Question

Is there idiomatic and/or elegant Python for zipping and applying a list of functions over a list of values?

For example, suppose you have a list of functions:

functions = [int, unicode, float, lambda x: '~' + x + '~']

and a list of values:

values = ['33', '\xc3\xa4', '3.14', 'flange']

Is there a way to apply the ith function to the ith value and return a list of the same length of the transformed values, while avoiding this ugly list comprehension?

[functions[i](values[i]) for i in range(len(functions))] # <- ugly

What I want is something like zip() + map() (zipmap()!) the functions list with the values list and have the functions be applied to their paired values. I thought itertools might offer something relevant, but functions like imap and starmap are for mapping a single function over an iterable, not an iterable of functions over another iterable.

Answer 1

These solutions seem overly complicated: map already zips its arguments:

map(lambda x,y:x(y), functions, values)

Or, if you prefer the iterator version:

from itertools import imap
imap(lambda x,y:x(y), functions, values)