pairwise combination of two lists

[Alain Ketterlin]

Yingjie Lin <Yingjie.Lin at mssm.edu> writes:

> I have two lists: 
>
> li1 = ['a', 'b']
> li2 = ['1', '2']
>
> and I wish to obtain a list like this
>
> li3 = ['a1', 'a2', 'b1', 'b2']
>
> Is there a handy and efficient function to do this, especially when
> li1 and li2 are long lists.

It's not difficult to write your own:

def product(l1,l2):
    for x1 in l1:
        for x2 in l2:
            yield x1+x2

use it like: for p in product(l1,l2) ... The call to product() produces
a generator, the cross product is never built in full, it should work on
long lists.

-- Alain.