Python Combine Lists -- Retain Relative Ordering

Question

Not sure how to get this guy done...

have:

L1 = [1,2,3]
L2 = [a,b,c]

want:

[1,a,2,b,3,c]

Answer 1

import itertools

L1 = [1,2,3]
L2 = ['a','b','c']
list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(itertools.izip(L1, L2)))

You could use izip_longest with a fill value for lists of uneven length.

Answer 2

Zip the lists then flatten the result:

Z = zip(L1, L2)
print [x for item in Z for x in item]