Question

I have a function that checks for file and directory changes within a given function and returns a tuple of lists, like this: addedFiles, removedFiles, addedDirs, removedDirs. Each of the named sublists in the tuple will be a list of strings (or empty). I need to append the results return by the function to local versions of these lists.

This heavily modified demonstrates the result I am after:

addedFiles, removedFiles, addedDirs, removedDirs = [],[],[],[]

for dir in allDirs:
    a,b,c,d = scanDir( dir )
    addedFiles.extend( a )
    removedFiles.extend( b )
    addedDirs.extend( c )
    removedDirs.extend( d )

But, I want to know if there is a better way to perform the section inside the for loop?
Like this it just feels a bit … ugly.

Answer 1

How about:

 for a,b in zip(lists, extendwith):
     a.extend(b)