list comprehension for multiple return function?
First of all, you made a small mistake: it should be:
[f(value) for value in x]
# ^ notice the `value`
instead of:
[f(x) for value in x]
Furthermore the point is that:
return 2*x,x
is short for:
return (2*x,x)
so a tuple. Your list comprehension thus generates a list of tuples, not a tuple of lists. The nice thing of zip
however is that you can easily use it in reverse with the asterisk:
xlist,ylist = zip(*[f(value) for value in x])
# ^ with asterisk
Note that xlist
and ylist
will be tuples (since zip
will be unpacked). If you want them to be lists, you can for instance use:
xlist,ylist = map(list,zip(*[f(value) for value in x]))
which results in:
>>> xlist
[0, 2, 4]
>>> ylist
[0, 1, 4]
(note that range
s start counting from 0)
Alternative: Another way to do this is of course:
xlist = [f(value)[0] for value in x]
ylist = [f(value)[1] for value in x]
But this is of course inelegantly and furthermore can be inefficient (given f
is computationally expensive).
Let's make this work. The function is fine:
def f(x):
return 2*x, x*x
But you want to define the range as follows, notice the starting and ending values:
x = range(1, 4)
Also, you have to call the function with the value, not with the list as parameter. And the final trick to unzip the result into two lists, is to simply zip(*lst)
the result of the list comprehension:
xlist, ylist = zip(*[f(value) for value in x])
Now the result is as expected:
xlist
=> [2, 4, 6]
ylist
=> [1, 4, 9]