[Tutor] Need help combining elements of a list of lists

[Mats Wichmann]

On 07/10/2018 09:09 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 09:46:57PM -0500, Jim wrote:
> 
>> Say I have a list like ltrs and I want to print out all the possible 3 
>> letter combinations. I want to combine letters from each inner list but 
>> not combine any letters within the inner list itself. So ACF and ADF 
>> would be ok but ABC would not.
>>
>> I can lay it out manually and see the pattern, I cannot figure out how 
>> to do it programically. Just in case this looks like homework it is not. 
>> It's a small test case I devised to try to figure it out so I can apply 
>> it to a bigger real world problem I am working on.
>>
>> ltrs = [['A', 'B'], ['C', 'D', 'E'], ['F', 'G', 'H', 'I']]
> 
> If you know that there are just three sublists, then you can do this:
> 
> for a in ltrs[0]:
>     for b in ltrs[1]:
>         for c in ltrs[2]:
>             print(a + b + c)
> 
> I trust that's easy enough to understand.
> 
> But here's a more general technique, where you don't need to know up 
> front how many nested lists there are:
> 
> 
> from itertools import product  # short for "Cartesian Product"
> for s in product(*ltrs):
>     print(''.join(s))

This is one of those cases where: if it's homework, getting the nested
loops right is almost certainly the way to go.  If it isn't, then
itertools (that is, "using an available library solution") is almost
certainly the way to go :)

If the eventual case is not just "letters", and a list of combined lists
is the eventual goal, then the concise stanza is:

prods = list(product(*ltrs))

print(prods) then gives you:

[('a', 'c', 'f'), ('a', 'c', 'g'), ('a', 'c', 'h'), ('a', 'c', 'i'),
('a', 'd', 'f'), ('a', 'd', 'g'), ('a', 'd', 'h'), ('a', 'd', 'i'),
('a', 'e', 'f'), ('a', 'e', 'g'), ('a', 'e', 'h'), ('a', 'e', 'i'),
('b', 'c', 'f'), ('b', 'c', 'g'), ('b', 'c', 'h'), ('b', 'c', 'i'),
('b', 'd', 'f'), ('b', 'd', 'g'), ('b', 'd', 'h'), ('b', 'd', 'i'),
('b', 'e', 'f'), ('b', 'e', 'g'), ('b', 'e', 'h'), ('b', 'e', 'i')]

if you want them concatenated, then of course join is the way to do that.