Flatten an irregular list of lists

Yes, I know this subject has been covered before (here, here, here, here), but as far as I know, all solutions, except for one, fail on a list like this:

L = [[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5]], 6]

Where the desired output is

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

Or perhaps even better, an iterator. The only solution I saw that works for an arbitrary nesting is found in this question:

def flatten(x):
    result = []
    for el in x:
        if hasattr(el, "__iter__") and not isinstance(el, basestring):
            result.extend(flatten(el))
        else:
            result.append(el)
    return result

flatten(L)

Is this the best model? Did I overlook something? Any problems?

Solution 1:

Using generator functions can make your example a little easier to read and probably boost the performance.

Python 2

def flatten(l):
    for el in l:
        if isinstance(el, collections.Iterable) and not isinstance(el, basestring):
            for sub in flatten(el):
                yield sub
        else:
            yield el

I used the Iterable ABC added in 2.6.

Python 3

In Python 3, the basestring is no more, but you can use a tuple of str and bytes to get the same effect there.

The yield from operator returns an item from a generator one at a time. This syntax for delegating to a subgenerator was added in 3.3

from collections.abc import Iterable

def flatten(l):
    for el in l:
        if isinstance(el, Iterable) and not isinstance(el, (str, bytes)):
            yield from flatten(el)
        else:
            yield el

Solution 2:

My solution:

import collections


def flatten(x):
    if isinstance(x, collections.Iterable):
        return [a for i in x for a in flatten(i)]
    else:
        return [x]

A little more concise, but pretty much the same.

Solution 3:

Generator using recursion and duck typing (updated for Python 3):

def flatten(L):
    for item in L:
        try:
            yield from flatten(item)
        except TypeError:
            yield item

list(flatten([[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5]], 6]))
>>>[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]