Double Iteration in List Comprehension
Gee, I guess I found the anwser: I was not taking care enough about which loop is inner and which is outer. The list comprehension should be like:
[x for b in a for x in b]
to get the desired result, and yes, one current value can be the iterator for the next loop.
To answer your question with your own suggestion:
>>> [x for b in a for x in b] # Works fine
While you asked for list comprehension answers, let me also point out the excellent itertools.chain():
>>> from itertools import chain
>>> list(chain.from_iterable(a))
>>> list(chain(*a)) # If you're using python < 2.6
Order of iterators may seem counter-intuitive.
Take for example: [str(x) for i in range(3) for x in foo(i)]
Let's decompose it:
def foo(i):
return i, i + 0.5
[str(x)
for i in range(3)
for x in foo(i)
]
# is same as
for i in range(3):
for x in foo(i):
yield str(x)
Suppose you have a text full of sentences and you want an array of words.
# Without list comprehension
list_of_words = []
for sentence in text:
for word in sentence:
list_of_words.append(word)
return list_of_words
I like to think of list comprehension as stretching code horizontally.
Try breaking it up into:
# List Comprehension
[word for sentence in text for word in sentence]
Example:
>>> text = (("Hi", "Steve!"), ("What's", "up?"))
>>> [word for sentence in text for word in sentence]
['Hi', 'Steve!', "What's", 'up?']
This also works for generators
>>> text = (("Hi", "Steve!"), ("What's", "up?"))
>>> gen = (word for sentence in text for word in sentence)
>>> for word in gen: print(word)
Hi
Steve!
What's
up?