Double Iteration in List Comprehension
I hope this helps someone else since a,b,x,y
don't have much meaning to me! Suppose you have a text full of sentences and you want an array of words.
# Without list comprehensionlist_of_words = []for sentence in text: for word in sentence: list_of_words.append(word)return list_of_words
I like to think of list comprehension as stretching code horizontally.
Try breaking it up into:
# List Comprehension [word for sentence in text for word in sentence]
Example:
>>> text = (("Hi", "Steve!"), ("What's", "up?"))>>> [word for sentence in text for word in sentence]['Hi', 'Steve!', "What's", 'up?']
This also works for generators
>>> text = (("Hi", "Steve!"), ("What's", "up?"))>>> gen = (word for sentence in text for word in sentence)>>> for word in gen: print(word)HiSteve!What'sup?
To answer your question with your own suggestion:
>>> [x for b in a for x in b] # Works fine
While you asked for list comprehension answers, let me also point out the excellent itertools.chain():
>>> from itertools import chain>>> list(chain.from_iterable(a))>>> list(chain(*a)) # If you're using python < 2.6
Gee, I guess I found the anwser: I was not taking care enough about which loop is inner and which is outer. The list comprehension should be like:
[x for b in a for x in b]
to get the desired result, and yes, one current value can be the iterator for the next loop.