How do I combine two numpy arrays element wise in python?

Question

I have two numpy arrays:

A = np.array([1, 3, 5, 7])
B = np.array([2, 4, 6, 8])

and I want to get the following from combining the two:

C = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

I'm able to get something close by using zip, but not quite what I'm looking for:

>>> zip(A, B)
[(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6), (7, 8)]

How do I combine the two numpy arrays element wise?

---

I did a quick test of 50,000 elements in each array (100,000 combined elements). Here are the results:

User Ma3x:      Time of execution: 0.0343832323429      Valid Array?:  True
User mishik:    Time of execution: 0.0439064509613      Valid Array?:  True
User Jaime:     Time of execution: 0.02767023558        Valid Array?:  True

^{Tested using Python 2.7, Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit, Intel Core i7 2720QM @2.2 Ghz Sandy Bridge, 8 GB Mem}

Answer 1

Use np.insert:

>>> A = np.array([1, 3, 5, 7])
>>> B = np.array([2, 4, 6, 8])
>>> np.insert(B, np.arange(len(A)), A)
array([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8])

Answer 2

Some answers suggested sorting, but since you want to combine them element-wise sorting won't achieve the same result.

Here is one way to do it

C = []
for elem in zip(A, B):
    C.extend(elem)