Question

I have a (python) list of lists as below

biglist=[ ['1','123-456','hello','there'],['2','987-456','program'],['1','123-456','list','of','lists'] ]

I need to get this in the following format

biglist_modified=[ ['1','123-456','hello there'],['2','987-456','program'],['1','123-456','list of lists'] ]

I need to concatenate the third element onwards in each inner list.I tried to do this by using list comprehensions,

def modify_biglist(bigl):
    ret =[]
    for alist in bigl:
        alist[2] = ' '.join(alist[2:])
        del alist[3:]
        ret.append(alist)
    return ret

This does the job..but it looks a bit convoluted -having a local variable ret and using del? Can someone suggest something better

Answer 1

[[x[0], x[1], " ".join(x[2:])] for x in biglist]

or, in-place:

for x in biglist:
    x[2:] = [" ".join(x[2:])]