What's the most efficient way to zip two nested list to a single level dictionary

Question

for example:

list1=['k1','k2','k3',['k4','k5',['k6','k7']]]
list2=['v1','v2','v3',['v4','v5',['v6','v7']]]

and I want to merge them to a dictionary like this:

dict1={'k1':'v1','k2':'v2','k3':'v3','k4':'v4','k5':'v5','k6':'v6','k7':'v7'}

I have a way to do this, but I think it takes too much time:

def mergeToDict(keyList, valueList):
    resultDict = {}
    for key, value in itertools.izip(keyList, valueList):
        if type(key) == list and type(value) == list:
            resultDict=dict(resultDict,**mergeToDict(key, value))
        elif type(key) != list and type(key) != dict and type(key) != tuple:
            resultDict[key] = value
    return resultDict

Is there any better ideas?

Answer 1

I'd use some kind of flatten function:

def flatten(it):
    if isinstance(it, str):
        yield it
        return
    try:
        for x in it:
            for y in flatten(x):
                yield y
    except TypeError:
        yield it

Now you can do

from itertools import izip
my_dict = dict(izip(flatten(list1), flatten(list2)))

I think this way is more general and more transparent for the reader.