How about
map(list, zip(*l))
--> [[1, 4, 7], [2, 5, 8], [3, 6, 9]]
For python 3.x users can use
list(map(list, zip(*l))) # short circuits at shortest nested list if table is jagged
list(map(list, itertools.zip_longest(*l, fillvalue=None))) # discards no data if jagged and fills short nested lists with None
Explanation:
There are two things we need to know to understand what's going on:
zip(*iterables)
This means zip
expects an arbitrary number of arguments each of which must be iterable. E.g. zip([1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6])
.args
, f(*args)
will call f
such that each element in args
is a separate positional argument of f
.itertools.zip_longest
does not discard any data if the number of elements of the nested lists are not the same (homogenous), and instead fills in the shorter nested lists then zips them up.Coming back to the input from the question l = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9]]
, zip(*l)
would be equivalent to zip([1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9])
. The rest is just making sure the result is a list of lists instead of a list of tuples.