[python] How do I concatenate two lists in Python?

How do I concatenate two lists in Python?

Example:

listone = [1, 2, 3]
listtwo = [4, 5, 6]

Expected outcome:

>>> joinedlist
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

If you need to merge two ordered lists with complicated sorting rules, you might have to roll it yourself like in the following code (using a simple sorting rule for readability :-) ).

list1 = [1,2,5]
list2 = [2,3,4]
newlist = []

while list1 and list2:
    if list1[0] == list2[0]:
        newlist.append(list1.pop(0))
        list2.pop(0)
    elif list1[0] < list2[0]:
        newlist.append(list1.pop(0))
    else:
        newlist.append(list2.pop(0))

if list1:
    newlist.extend(list1)
if list2:
    newlist.extend(list2)

assert(newlist == [1, 2, 3, 4, 5])

It's also possible to create a generator that simply iterates over the items in both lists using itertools.chain(). This allows you to chain lists (or any iterable) together for processing without copying the items to a new list:

import itertools
for item in itertools.chain(listone, listtwo):
    # Do something with each list item

As already pointed out by many, itertools.chain() is the way to go if one needs to apply exactly the same treatment to both lists. In my case, I had a label and a flag which were different from one list to the other, so I needed something slightly more complex. As it turns out, behind the scenes itertools.chain() simply does the following:

for it in iterables:
    for element in it:
        yield element

(see https://docs.python.org/2/library/itertools.html), so I took inspiration from here and wrote something along these lines:

for iterable, header, flag in ( (newList, 'New', ''), (modList, 'Modified', '-f')):
    print header + ':'
    for path in iterable:
        [...]
        command = 'cp -r' if os.path.isdir(srcPath) else 'cp'
        print >> SCRIPT , command, flag, srcPath, mergedDirPath
        [...]

The main points to understand here are that lists are just a special case of iterable, which are objects like any other; and that for ... in loops in python can work with tuple variables, so it is simple to loop on multiple variables at the same time.

If you want to merge the two lists in sorted form, you can use the merge function from the heapq library.

from heapq import merge

a = [1, 2, 4]
b = [2, 4, 6, 7]

print list(merge(a, b))

This is quite simple, and I think it was even shown in the tutorial:

>>> listone = [1,2,3]
>>> listtwo = [4,5,6]
>>>
>>> listone + listtwo
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

This question directly asks about joining two lists. However it's pretty high in search even when you are looking for a way of joining many lists (including the case when you joining zero lists).

I think the best option is to use list comprehensions:

>>> a = [[1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]]
>>> [x for xs in a for x in xs]
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

You can create generators as well:

>>> map(str, (x for xs in a for x in xs))
['1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9']

Old Answer

Consider this more generic approach:

a = [[1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]]
reduce(lambda c, x: c + x, a, [])

Will output:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Note, this also works correctly when a is [] or [[1,2,3]].

However, this can be done more efficiently with itertools:

a = [[1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]]
list(itertools.chain(*a))

If you don't need a list, but just an iterable, omit list().

Update

Alternative suggested by Patrick Collins in the comments could also work for you:

sum(a, [])

import itertools

A = list(zip([1,3,5,7,9],[2,4,6,8,10]))
B = [1,3,5,7,9]+[2,4,6,8,10]
C = list(set([1,3,5,7,9] + [2,4,6,8,10]))

D = [1,3,5,7,9]
D.append([2,4,6,8,10])

E = [1,3,5,7,9]
E.extend([2,4,6,8,10])

F = []
for a in itertools.chain([1,3,5,7,9], [2,4,6,8,10]):
    F.append(a)


print ("A: " + str(A))
print ("B: " + str(B))
print ("C: " + str(C))
print ("D: " + str(D))
print ("E: " + str(E))
print ("F: " + str(F))

Output:

A: [(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6), (7, 8), (9, 10)]
B: [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10]
C: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
D: [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, [2, 4, 6, 8, 10]]
E: [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10]
F: [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10]

If you are using NumPy, you can concatenate two arrays of compatible dimensions with this command:

numpy.concatenate([a,b])

You could simply use the + or += operator as follows:

a = [1, 2, 3]
b = [4, 5, 6]

c = a + b

Or:

c = []
a = [1, 2, 3]
b = [4, 5, 6]

c += (a + b)

Also, if you want the values in the merged list to be unique you can do:

c = list(set(a + b))

With Python 3.3+ you can use yield from:

listone = [1,2,3]
listtwo = [4,5,6]

def merge(l1, l2):
    yield from l1
    yield from l2

>>> list(merge(listone, listtwo))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Or, if you want to support an arbitrary number of iterators:

def merge(*iters):
    for it in iters:
        yield from it

>>> list(merge(listone, listtwo, 'abcd', [20, 21, 22]))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 20, 21, 22]

How do I concatenate two lists in Python?

As of 3.9, these are the most popular stdlib methods for concatenating two (or more) lists in python.

Footnotes

1. This is a slick solution because of its succinctness. But sum performs concatenation in a pairwise fashion, which means this is a quadratic operation as memory has to be allocated for each step. DO NOT USE if your lists are large.

2. See chain and chain.from_iterable from the docs. You will need to import itertools first. Concatenation is linear in memory, so this is the best in terms of performance and version compatibility. chain.from_iterable was introduced in 2.6.

3. This method uses Additional Unpacking Generalizations (PEP 448), but cannot generalize to N lists unless you manually unpack each one yourself.

4. a += b and a.extend(b) are more or less equivalent for all practical purposes. += when called on a list will internally call list.__iadd__, which extends the first list by the second.

Performance

2-List Concatenation¹

There's not much difference between these methods but that makes sense given they all have the same order of complexity (linear). There's no particular reason to prefer one over the other except as a matter of style.

N-List Concatenation

Plots have been generated using the perfplot module. Code, for your reference.

_{1. The iadd (+=) and extend methods operate in-place, so a copy has to be generated each time before testing. To keep things fair, all methods have a pre-copy step for the left-hand list which can be ignored.}

Comments on Other Solutions

• DO NOT USE THE DUNDER METHOD list.__add__ directly in any way, shape or form. In fact, stay clear of dunder methods, and use the operators and operator functions like they were designed for. Python has careful semantics baked into these which are more complicated than just calling the dunder directly. Here is an example. So, to summarise, a.__add__(b) => BAD; a + b => GOOD.

• Some answers here offer reduce(operator.add, [a, b]) for pairwise concatenation -- this is the same as sum([a, b], []) only more wordy.

• Any method that uses set will drop duplicates and lose ordering. Use with caution.

• for i in b: a.append(i) is more wordy, and slower than a.extend(b), which is single function call and more idiomatic. append is slower because of the semantics with which memory is allocated and grown for lists. See here for a similar discussion.

• heapq.merge will work, but its use case is for merging sorted lists in linear time. Using it in any other situation is an anti-pattern.

• yielding list elements from a function is an acceptable method, but chain does this faster and better (it has a code path in C, so it is fast).

• operator.add(a, b) is an acceptable functional equivalent to a + b. It's use cases are mainly for dynamic method dispatch. Otherwise, prefer a + b which is shorter and more readable, in my opinion. YMMV.

You can use sets to obtain merged list of unique values

mergedlist = list(set(listone + listtwo))

Use a simple list comprehension:

joined_list = [item for list_ in [list_one, list_two] for item in list_]

It has all the advantages of the newest approach of using Additional Unpacking Generalizations - i.e. you can concatenate an arbitrary number of different iterables (for example, lists, tuples, ranges, and generators) that way - and it's not limited to Python 3.5 or later.

list(set(listone) | set(listtwo))

The above code, does not preserve order, removes duplicate from each list (but not from the concatenated list)

Python >= 3.5 alternative: [*l1, *l2]

Another alternative has been introduced via the acceptance of PEP 448 which deserves mentioning.

The PEP, titled Additional Unpacking Generalizations, generally reduced some syntactic restrictions when using the starred * expression in Python; with it, joining two lists (applies to any iterable) can now also be done with:

>>> l1 = [1, 2, 3]
>>> l2 = [4, 5, 6]
>>> joined_list = [*l1, *l2]  # unpack both iterables in a list literal
>>> print(joined_list)
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

This functionality was defined for Python 3.5 it hasn't been backported to previous versions in the 3.x family. In unsupported versions a SyntaxError is going to be raised.

As with the other approaches, this too creates as shallow copy of the elements in the corresponding lists.

The upside to this approach is that you really don't need lists in order to perform it, anything that is iterable will do. As stated in the PEP:

This is also useful as a more readable way of summing iterables into a list, such as my_list + list(my_tuple) + list(my_range) which is now equivalent to just [*my_list, *my_tuple, *my_range].

So while addition with + would raise a TypeError due to type mismatch:

l = [1, 2, 3]
r = range(4, 7)
res = l + r

The following won't:

res = [*l, *r]

because it will first unpack the contents of the iterables and then simply create a list from the contents.

For cases with a low number of lists you can simply add the lists together or use in-place unpacking (available in Python-3.5+):

In [1]: listone = [1, 2, 3] 
   ...: listtwo = [4, 5, 6]                                                                                                                                                                                 

In [2]: listone + listtwo                                                                                                                                                                                   
Out[2]: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
                                                                                                                                                                                     
In [3]: [*listone, *listtwo]                                                                                                                                                                                
Out[3]: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

As a more general way for cases with more number of lists, as a pythonic approach, you can use chain.from_iterable()¹ function from itertoold module. Also, based on this answer this function is the best; or at least a very food way for flatting a nested list as well.

>>> l=[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9]]
>>> import itertools
>>> list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(l))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

If you can't use the plus operator (+), you can use the operator import:

import operator

listone = [1,2,3]
listtwo = [4,5,6]

result = operator.add(listone, listtwo)
print(result)

>>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Alternatively, you could also use the __add__ dunder function:

listone = [1,2,3]
listtwo = [4,5,6]

result = list.__add__(listone, listtwo)
print(result)

>>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

So there are two easy ways.

1. Using +: It creates a new list from provided lists

Example:

In [1]: a = [1, 2, 3]

In [2]: b = [4, 5, 6]

In [3]: a + b
Out[3]: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

In [4]: %timeit a + b
10000000 loops, best of 3: 126 ns per loop

2. Using extend: It appends new list to existing list. That means it does not create a separate list.

Example:

In [1]: a = [1, 2, 3]

In [2]: b = [4, 5, 6]

In [3]: %timeit a.extend(b)
10000000 loops, best of 3: 91.1 ns per loop

Thus we see that out of two of most popular methods, extend is efficient.

 a=[1,2,3]
 b=[4,5,6]

 c=a+b
 print(c)

OUTPUT:

 >>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

In the above code "+" operator is used to concatenate the 2 lists into a single list.

ANOTHER SOLUTION:

 a=[1,2,3]
 b=[4,5,6]
 c=[] #Empty list in which we are going to append the values of list (a) and (b)

 for i in a:
     c.append(i)
 for j in b:
     c.append(j)

 print(c)

OUTPUT:

>>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

It's worth noting that the itertools.chain function accepts variable number of arguments:

>>> l1 = ['a']; l2 = ['b', 'c']; l3 = ['d', 'e', 'f']
>>> [i for i in itertools.chain(l1, l2)]
['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> [i for i in itertools.chain(l1, l2, l3)]
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']

If an iterable (tuple, list, generator, etc.) is the input, the from_iterable class method may be used:

>>> il = [['a'], ['b', 'c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']]
>>> [i for i in itertools.chain.from_iterable(il)]
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']

I assume you are wanting one of the two methods:

Keep Duplicate elements

It is very easy, just concatenate like string:

def concat_list(l1,l2):
    l3 = l1+l2
    return l3

Next if you want to eliminate duplicate elements

def concat_list(l1,l2):
   l3 = []
   for i in [l1,l2]:
     for j in i:   
       if j not in l3:   
         #Check if element exists in final list, if no then add element to list
         l3.append(j)
   return l3

You can use the union() function in python.

joinedlist = union(listone, listtwo)
print(joinedlist)

Essentially what this is doing is its removing one of every duplicate in the two lists. Since your lists don't have any duplicates it, it just returns the concatenated version of the two lists.

A really concise way to combine a list of lists is

list_of_lists = [[1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]]
reduce(list.__add__, list_of_lists)

which gives us

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

You could use the append() method defined on list objects:

mergedlist =[]
for elem in listone:
    mergedlist.append(elem)
for elem in listtwo:
    mergedlist.append(elem)

You could also use the list.extend() method in order to add a list to the end of another one:

listone = [1,2,3]
listtwo = [4,5,6]

listone.extend(listtwo)

If you want to keep the original list intact, you can create a new list object, and extend both lists to it:

mergedlist = []
mergedlist.extend(listone)
mergedlist.extend(listtwo)