[New-bugs-announce] [issue33214] join method for list and tuple

[Javier Dehesa]

New submission from Javier Dehesa <javidcf at gmail.com>:

It is pretty trivial to concatenate a sequence of strings:

    ''.join([str1, str2, ...])

Concatenating a sequence of lists is for some reason significantly more convoluted. Some current options include:

    sum([lst1, lst2, ...], [])
    [x for y [lst1, lst2, ...] for x in y]
    list(itertools.chain(lst1, lst2, ...))

The first one being the less recomendable but more intuitive and the third one being the faster but most cumbersome (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49631326/why-is-itertools-chain-faster-than-a-flattening-list-comprehension ). None of these looks like "the one obvious way to do it" to me. Furthermore, I feel a dedicated concatenation method could be more efficient than any of these approaches.

If we accept that ''.join(...) is an intuitive idiom, why not provide the syntax:

    [].join([lst1, lst2, ...])

And while we are at it:

    ().join([tpl1, tpl2, ...])

Like with str, these methods should only accept sequences of objects of their own class (e.g. we could do [].join(list(s) for s in seqs) if seqs contains lists, tuples and generators). The use case for non-empty joiners would probably be less frequent than for strings, but it also solves a problem that has no clean solution with the current tools. Here is what I would probably do to join a sequence of lists with [None, 'STOP', None]:

lsts = [lst1, lst2, ...]
joiner = [None, 'STOP', None]
lsts_joined = list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(lst + joiner for lst in lsts))[:-len(joiner)]

Which is awful and inefficient (I am not saying this is the best or only possible way to solve it, it is just what I, self-considered experienced Python developer, might write).

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components: Library (Lib)
messages: 314881
nosy: Javier Dehesa
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: join method for list and tuple
type: enhancement

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue33214>
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