Zip lists in Python

Solution 1:

When you zip() together three lists containing 20 elements each, the result has twenty elements. Each element is a three-tuple.

See for yourself:

In [1]: a = b = c = range(20)

In [2]: zip(a, b, c)
Out[2]: 
[(0, 0, 0),
 (1, 1, 1),
 ...
 (17, 17, 17),
 (18, 18, 18),
 (19, 19, 19)]

To find out how many elements each tuple contains, you could examine the length of the first element:

In [3]: result = zip(a, b, c)

In [4]: len(result[0])
Out[4]: 3

Of course, this won't work if the lists were empty to start with.

zip takes a bunch of lists likes

a: a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7...
b: b1 b2 b3 b4 b5 b6 b7...
c: c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 c7...

and "zips" them into one list whose entries are 3-tuples (ai, bi, ci). Imagine drawing a zipper horizontally from left to right.

In Python 2.7 this might have worked fine:

>>> a = b = c = range(20)
>>> zip(a, b, c)

But in Python 3.4 it should be (otherwise, the result will be something like <zip object at 0x00000256124E7DC8>):

>>> a = b = c = range(20)
>>> list(zip(a, b, c))

zip creates a new list, filled with tuples containing elements from the iterable arguments:

>>> zip ([1,2],[3,4])
[(1,3), (2,4)]

I expect what you try to so is create a tuple where each element is a list.

In Python 3 zip returns an iterator instead and needs to be passed to a list function to get the zipped tuples:

x = [1, 2, 3]; y = ['a','b','c']
z = zip(x, y)
z = list(z)
print(z)
>>> [(1, 'a'), (2, 'b'), (3, 'c')]

Then to unzip them back just conjugate the zipped iterator:

x_back, y_back = zip(*z)
print(x_back); print(y_back)
>>> (1, 2, 3)
>>> ('a', 'b', 'c')

If the original form of list is needed instead of tuples:

x_back, y_back = zip(*z)
print(list(x_back)); print(list(y_back))
>>> [1,2,3]
>>> ['a','b','c']