Concatenating two lists - difference between '+=' and extend()

Solution 1:

The only difference on a bytecode level is that the .extend way involves a function call, which is slightly more expensive in Python than the INPLACE_ADD.

It's really nothing you should be worrying about, unless you're performing this operation billions of times. It is likely, however, that the bottleneck would lie some place else.

Solution 2:

You can't use += for non-local variable (variable which is not local for function and also not global)

def main():
    l = [1, 2, 3]

    def foo():
        l.extend([4])

    def boo():
        l += [5]

    foo()
    print l
    boo()  # this will fail

main()

It's because for extend case compiler will load the variable l using LOAD_DEREF instruction, but for += it will use LOAD_FAST - and you get *UnboundLocalError: local variable 'l' referenced before assignment*

Solution 3:

You can chain function calls, but you can't += a function call directly:

class A:
    def __init__(self):
        self.listFoo = [1, 2]
        self.listBar = [3, 4]

    def get_list(self, which):
        if which == "Foo":
            return self.listFoo
        return self.listBar

a = A()
other_list = [5, 6]

a.get_list("Foo").extend(other_list)
a.get_list("Foo") += other_list  #SyntaxError: can't assign to function call