Question

Specifically, I have two lists of strings that I’d like to combine into a string where each line is the next two strings from the lists, separated by spaces:

a = ['foo1', 'foo2', 'foo3']
b = ['bar1', 'bar2', 'bar3']

I want a function combine_to_lines() that would return:

"""foo1 bar1
foo2 bar2
foo3 bar3"""

I admit I’ve already solved this problem, so I’m going to post the answer. But perhaps someone else has a better one or sees a flaw in mine.

Update: I over-simplified my example above. In my real-world problem the lines were formatted in a more complicated manner that required the tuples returned from zip() to be unpacked. But kudos to mhawke for coming up to the simplest solution to this example.

Answer 1

It’s not necessary to unpack and repack the tuples returned by zip:

'\n'.join(' '.join(x) for x in zip(a, b))