Convert a list of characters into a string

Question

If I have a list of chars   a     a   b   c   d     How do I convert it into a single string   a    abcd

User · Answer

If your Python interpreter is old  1 5 2  for example  which is common on some older Linux distributions   you may not have join   available as a method on any old string object  and you will instead need to use the string module  Example   a     a    b    c    d    try      b      join a   except AttributeError      import string     b   string join a        The string b will be  abcd

User · Answer

The reduce function also works  import operator h   a   b   c   d   reduce operator add  h   abcd

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h     a   b   c   d   e   f   g      for f in h      g   g   f   gt  gt  gt  g  abcdef

User · Answer

Use the join method of the empty string to join all of the strings together with the empty string in between  like so    gt  gt  gt  a     a    b    c    d    gt  gt  gt     join a   abcd

User · Answer

You could also use operator concat   like this    gt  gt  gt  from operator import concat  gt  gt  gt  a     a    b    c    d    gt  gt  gt  reduce concat  a   abcd    If you re using Python 3 you need to prepend    gt  gt  gt  from functools import reduce   since the builtin reduce   has been removed from Python 3 and now lives in functools reduce

User · Answer

If the list contains numbers  you can use map   with join     Eg    gt  gt  gt  arr    3  30  34  5  9   gt  gt  gt     join map str  arr   3303459

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This may be the fastest way    gt  gt  from array import array  gt  gt  a     a   b   c   d    gt  gt  array  B   map ord a   tostring    abcd

User · Answer

besides str join which is the most natural way  a possibility is to use io StringIO and abusing writelines to write all elements in one go   import io  a     a   b   c   d    out   io StringIO   out writelines a  print out getvalue      prints   abcd   When using this approach with a generator function or an iterable which isn t a tuple or a list  it saves the temporary list creation that join does to allocate the right size in one go  and a list of 1-character strings is very expensive memory-wise    If you re low in memory and you have a lazily-evaluated object as input  this approach is the best solution

User · Answer

This works in many popular languages like JavaScript and Ruby  why not in Python    gt  gt  gt    a    b    c   join     Traceback  most recent call last      File   lt stdin gt    line 1  in  lt module gt  AttributeError   list  object has no attribute  join    Strange enough  in Python the join method is on the str class     this is the Python way    join   a   b   c   d      Why join is not a method in the list object like in JavaScript or other popular script languages  It is one example of how the Python community thinks  Since join is returning a string  it should be placed in the string class  not on the list class  so the str join list  method means  join the list into a new string using str as a separator  in this case str is an empty string     Somehow I got to love this way of thinking after a while  I can complain about a lot of things in Python design  but not about its coherence

[python] Convert a list of characters into a string

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