Summing over lists in python - is there a better way?

Question

Is there a more sensible way of doing this? I want to make a new list by summing over the indices of a lot of other lists. I'm fairly new to programming and this seems like a very clunky method!

list1 = [1,2,3,4,5]
list2 = [1,1,1,4,1]
list3 = [1,22,3,1,5]
list4 = [1,2,5,4,5]
...
list100 = [4,5,6,7,8]

i = 0
while i < len(list1):
    mynewlist[i] = list1[i]+list2[i]+list3[i]+list4[i]+...list100[i]
    i = i+1

Answer 1

This is a pretty good use case for zip.

>>> list1 = [1,2,3,4,5]
>>> list2 = [1,1,1,4,1]
>>> list3 = [1,22,3,1,5]
>>> list4 = [1,2,5,4,5]
>>> [sum(x) for x in zip(list1, list2, list3, list4)]
[4, 27, 12, 13, 16]

or if you have your data as a list of lists instead of separate lists:

>>> data = [[1,2,3,4,5], [1,1,1,4,1], [1,22,3,1,5], [1,2,5,4,5]]
>>> [sum(x) for x in zip(*data)]
[4, 27, 12, 13, 16]

similarly, if you store your data as a dict of lists, you can use dict.itervalues() or dict.values() to retrieve the list values and use that in a similar fashion:

>>> data = {"a":[1,2,3], "b":[3,4,4]}
>>> [sum(x) for x in zip(*data.itervalues())]
[4, 6, 7]

---

Note that if your lists are of unequal length, zip will work up till the shortest list length. For example:

>>> data = [[1,2,3,4,5], [1,1], [1,22], [1,2,5]]
>>> [sum(x) for x in zip(*data)]
[4, 27]

If you wish to get a result that includes all data, you can use itertools.izip_longest (with an appropriate fillvalue). Example:

>>> data = [[1,2,3,4,5], [1,1], [1,22], [1,2,5]]
>>> [sum(x) for x in izip_longest(*data, fillvalue=0)]
[4, 27, 8, 4, 5]