How do I concatenate two lists in Python?

Solution 1:

You can use the + operator to combine them:

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

joinedlist = listone + listtwo

Output:

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

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

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

Solution 4:

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)

Solution 5:

You can use sets to obtain merged list of unique values

mergedlist = list(set(listone + listtwo))