Flatten a list of strings and lists of strings and lists in Python [duplicate]

Question

Similar questions have been asked before, but the solutions to those don't work for my use case (e.g., Making a flat list out of list of lists in Python and Flattening a shallow list in Python. I have is a list of strings and lists, where embedded list can also contain strings and lists. I want to turn this into a simple list of strings without splitting strings into list of characters.

import itertools

list_of_menuitems = ['image10', ['image00', 'image01'], ['image02', ['image03', 'image04']]]
chain = itertools.chain(*list_of_menuitems)

Resulting list:

['i', 'm', 'a', 'g', 'e', '1', '0', 'image00', 'image01', 'image02', ['image03', 'image04']]

Expected result:

['image10', 'image00', 'image01', 'image02', 'image03', 'image04']

What's the best (Pythonic) way to do this?

Answer 1

The oft-repeated flatten function can be applied to this circumstance with a simple modification.

from collections import Iterable
def flatten(coll):
    for i in coll:
            if isinstance(i, Iterable) and not isinstance(i, basestring):
                for subc in flatten(i):
                    yield subc
            else:
                yield i

basestring will make sure that both str and unicode objects are not split.

There are also versions which count on i not having the __iter__ attribute. I don't know about all that, because I think that str now has that attribute. But, it's worth mentioning.

(Please upvote the linked answer.)

Answer 2

Using recursion.

def flatten(A):
    rt = []
    for i in A:
        if isinstance(i,list): rt.extend(flatten(i))
        else: rt.append(i)
    return rt

Test:

>>> list_of_menuitems = ['image10', ['image00', 'image01'], ['image02', ['image0
3', 'image04']]]
>>> flattern(list_of_menuitems)
['image10', 'image00', 'image01', 'image02', 'image03', 'image04']

Answer 3

The following works for strings (and would be easily adapted to other types):

def flatten_to_strings(listOfLists):
    """Flatten a list of (lists of (lists of strings)) for any level 
    of nesting"""
    result = []

    for i in listOfLists:
        # Only append if i is a basestring (superclass of string)
        if isinstance(i, basestring):
            result.append(i)
        # Otherwise call this function recursively
        else:
            result.extend(flatten_to_strings(i))
    return result

flatten_to_strings(list_of_menuitems)
Out[2]: ['image10', 'image00', 'image01', 'image02', 'image03', 'image04']

Answer 4

In one specialized case when none of the list items contains one of the following delimiters []', you can use the following hack. I have not profiled it, but it looks obvious that, this would have a better performance than the obvious and cleaner recursive solution.

>>> str(list_of_menuitems).translate(None,"[]'").split(',')
['image10', ' image00', ' image01', ' image02', ' image03', ' image04']

I agree, this is a dirty hack, but does the JOB, without much effort.