Most Pythonic way to concatenate strings

Question

Given this harmless little list:

>>> lst = ['o','s','s','a','m','a'] 

My goal is to pythonically concatenate the little devils using one of the following ways:

A. plain ol' string function to get the job done, short, no imports

>>> ''.join(lst) 'ossama' 

B. lambda, lambda, lambda

>>> reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, lst) 'ossama' 

C. globalization (do nothing, import everything)

>>> import functools, operator >>> functools.reduce(operator.add, lst) 'ossama' 

Please suggest other pythonic ways to achieve this magnanimous task.

Please rank (pythonic level) and rate solutions giving concise explanations.

In this case, is the most pythonic solution the best coding solution?

Answer 1

''.join(lst) 

the only pythonic way:

• clear (that what all the big boys do and what they expect to see),
• simple (no additional imports needed, stable across all versions),
• fast (written in C) and
• concise (on an empty string join elements of iterable!).

Answer 2

Have a look at Guido's essay on python optimization, it covers converting lists of numbers to strings. Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, use the join example.