Question

I’m sure that this is pretty easy to do but I’m not sure how to do it.

I have three lists: list1=[a1, a2, a3...], list2=[b1, b2, b3...], and list3=[c1, c2, c3...]

I want to pass a list that is a by-item merger of these three:

finalList = [[a1, b1, c1,], [a2, b2, c2], [a3, b3, c3]...]

How do I do this?

Answer 1

That’s what the built-in zip() is for:

final_list = zip(list1, list2, list3)

Note that final_list will actually be a list of tuples, and its length will be the length of the shortest input list.

The functions itertools.izip() and itertools.izip_longest() are also noteworthy.