Iterating through lists of different lengths which are inside a list [duplicate]

Question

I have the following list:

a = [[1, [0], [0], [1, [0]]], [1, [0], [0], [1, [0]]], [1, [0], [0]]]

and I would like to take all the integers and make a string out of them:

b = '1001010010100'

Is there any way I can do this? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Here is a rebellious approach:

a = [[1, [0], [0], [1, [0]]], [1, [0], [0], [1, [0]]], [1, [0], [0]]]
b = ''.join(c for c in str(a) if c.isdigit())

Answer 2

You can write a function that recursively iterates through your nested listed and tries to convert each element to an iterator.

def recurse_iter(it):
    if isinstance(it, basestring):
        yield it
    else:
        try:
            for element in iter(it):
                for subelement in recurse_iter(element):
                    yield subelement
        except TypeError:
            yield it

This hideous function will produce a list of the strings and non-iterable members in an object.

a = [[1, [0], [0], [1, [0]]], [1, [0], [0], [1, [0]]], [1, [0], [0]]]
list(recurse_iter(a))
# [1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0]

Converting this to a string is straight forward enough.

''.join(map(str, recurse_iter(a)))

Answer 3

Code -

def solve(x):                                                        
    if isinstance(x, int):
        return str(x)
    return ''.join(solve(y) for y in x)

print(solve(a))

Output -

1001010010100

Answer 4

You are looking for a flatten function:

def flatten_str(x):
    if isinstance(x, list):
        return "".join(flatten_str(a) for a in x)
    else:
        return str(x)