Question

I have two iterators, a list and an itertools.count object (i.e. an infinite value generator). I would like to merge these two into a resulting iterator that will alternate yield values between the two:

>>> import itertools >>> c = itertools.count(1) >>> items = ['foo', 'bar'] >>> merged = imerge(items, c)  # the mythical 'imerge' >>> merged.next() 'foo' >>> merged.next() 1 >>> merged.next() 'bar' >>> merged.next() 2 >>> merged.next() Traceback (most recent call last):     ... StopIteration 

What is the simplest, most concise way to do this?

Answer 1

A generator will solve your problem nicely.

def imerge(a, b):     for i, j in itertools.izip(a,b):         yield i         yield j