How to append list to second list

Question

How do I concatenate two lists in Python?

Example:

listone = [1,2,3]
listtwo = [4,5,6]

Expected outcome:

joinedlist == [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

what about if listone was [3,2,1]? Will the output change? — barkmadley, Nov 12 '09 at 7:06
Could have found answer in any Python reference or tutorial. Personally I don't mind, but this question looks like asked solely for reputation mining ;) — Clergyman, Feb 8 '14 at 12:46
'merge' as 'create one shallow-copy', 'deep-copy' or 'iterate from'? (@Clergyman, it's not at all that trivial) — smci, Sep 12 '14 at 3:31
Isn’t this operation called concatination rather than merging? I always thought merging means concatination + sorting. — mcb, Nov 8 '14 at 2:33
This question's searchability could be improved if the terms 'looping' and 'concatenate' were added. — florisla, Sep 9 '15 at 13:22

Daniel G · Accepted Answer · 2009-11-12 07:07:06Z

up vote 1171 down vote accepted

Python makes this ridiculously easy.

mergedlist = listone + listtwo

answered Nov 12 '09 at 7:07

Daniel G

19.1k 3 24 34

24

does this create a deep copy of listone and appends listtwo? – Daniel F Apr 19 '12 at 12:34

53

@Daniel it will create a new list with a shallow copy of the items in the first list, followed by a shallow copy of the items in the second list. Use copy.deepcopy to get deep copies of lists. – Daniel G Apr 19 '12 at 14:51

47

another useful detail here: listone += listtwo results in listone == [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] – br1ckb0t Jan 29 '14 at 16:14

4

@br1ckb0t will that change what listone is pointing at? So:list3 = listone listone+=listtwo Is list3 changed as well? – MikeH Feb 19 '14 at 5:01

3

it does change list3. However, if that isn't a problem, it's simpler more readable to add the two lists instead of creating a new one. – br1ckb0t Feb 20 '14 at 18:55

show 3 more comments

Robert Rossney · Answer 2 · 2009-11-12 20:01:50Z

up vote 104 down vote

It's also possible to create a generator that simply iterates over the items in both lists. This allows you to chain lists (or any iterable) together for processing without copying the items to a new list:

import itertools
for item in itertools.chain(listone, listtwo):
   # do something with each list item

answered Nov 12 '09 at 20:01

Robert Rossney

52.5k 16 89 177

9

This is better way because it also works with numpy array. – d.putto Sep 25 '12 at 9:37

1

will this work the same way: mergedList = itertools.chain(listone, listtwo) for item in mergedList: – yourfriendzak Mar 1 '13 at 0:55

4

@d.putto: individual item access is very slow for numpy arrays (each access requires to convert the raw memory with a C type to Python object. Vectorized operations such as np.dot() work on the C types directly without the round trip to Python and therefore fast). You could use merged = np.r_[a, b] to get concatenated numpy array. – J.F. Sebastian Apr 30 '14 at 3:38

add a comment

thefourtheye · Answer 3 · 2014-04-02 07:28:31Z

up vote 85 down vote

You can use sets to obtain merged list of unique values

mergedlist = list(set(listone + listtwo))

edited Apr 2 '14 at 7:28

thefourtheye

101k 11 115 186

answered Sep 20 '10 at 8:43

Radagast

1,380 9 13

42

this will lose ordering information. – aaronasterling Sep 20 '10 at 8:45

16

True, however, it will also remove duplicates, if that's what you are interested in. List addition along would not do that. – metasoarous Aug 21 '12 at 0:28

4

Better than listone + [x for x in listtwo if x not in listone] – Natim Jan 29 '13 at 13:13

1

If I had a list of lists, such as this one: [[0, 5], [1, 10], [0, 7], [3, 5]] How would you merge them to avoid duplicates in the key (first value in each sub-list), but if they are duplicates, end up with the sum of the second values? Like so: [[0, 12], [1, 10], [3, 5]] Thanks – jslvtr Jul 23 '13 at 12:24

2

+1 IMHO this is the correct way to "merge" (union) lists while the "approved" answer describes how to combine/add lists (multiset) – alfasin Apr 27 '14 at 4:07

show 2 more comments

Tuure Laurinolli · Answer 4 · 2009-11-12 07:07:37Z

up vote 31 down vote

This is quite simple, I think it was even shown in the tutorial:

>>> listone = [1,2,3]
>>> listtwo = [4,5,6]
>>>
>>> listone + listtwo
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

answered Nov 12 '09 at 7:07

Tuure Laurinolli

1,628 9 16

add a comment

Gourneau · Answer 5

up vote 26 down vote

You could also do

listone = [1,2,3]
listtwo = [4,5,6]
mergedlist = []
mergedlist.extend(listone)
mergedlist.extend(listtwo)

answered Jan 22 '13 at 7:51

community wiki

Gourneau

@MatthewPurdon extend won't take a single item, it expects a list. – mateor Oct 15 '14 at 21:43

add a comment

Peter Mortensen · Answer 6 · 2013-12-22 09:21:39Z

up vote 18 down vote

You could simply use the + or += operator as follows:

a = [1, 2, 3]
b = [4, 5, 6]

c = a + b

Or:

c = []
a = [1, 2, 3]
b = [4, 5, 6]

c += (a + b)

Also, if you want the values in the merged list to be unique you can do:

c = list(set(a + b))

edited Dec 22 '13 at 9:21

Peter Mortensen

9,214 10 64 98

answered Mar 5 '13 at 9:15

Amyth

12.1k 8 44 81

add a comment

Dariusz Walczak · Answer 7 · 2013-02-05 05:01:34Z

It's worth noting that the itertools.chain function accepts variable number of arguments:

>>> l1 = ['a']; l2 = ['b', 'c']; l3 = ['d', 'e', 'f']
>>> [i for i in itertools.chain(l1, l2)]
['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> [i for i in itertools.chain(l1, l2, l3)]
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']

If an iterable (tuple, list, generator, etc.) is the input, the from_iterable class method may be used:

>>> il = [['a'], ['b', 'c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']]
>>> [i for i in itertools.chain.from_iterable(il)]
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']

user688635 · Answer 8 · 2014-07-21 00:53:24Z

With Python 3.3+ you can use yield from:

listone = [1,2,3]
listtwo = [4,5,6]

def merge(l1, l2):
    yield from l1
    yield from l2

>>> list(merge(listone, listtwo))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Or, if you want to support an arbitrary number of iterators:

def merge(*iters):
    for it in iters:
        yield from it

>>> list(merge(listone, listtwo, 'abcd', [20, 21, 22]))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 20, 21, 22]

Linus Unnebäck · Answer 9 · 2015-07-07 14:26:11Z

up vote 7 down vote

If you want to merge the two lists in sorted form, you can use merge function from the heapq library.

from heapq import merge

a = [1,2,4]
b = [2,4,6,7]

print list(merge(a,b))

edited Jul 7 '15 at 14:26

Linus Unnebäck

4,466 2 27 43

answered Jul 7 '15 at 13:30

lavee_singh

182 2 11

add a comment

Peter Mortensen · Answer 10 · 2013-12-22 09:23:45Z

If you need to merge two ordered lists with complicated sorting rules, you might have to roll it yourself like in the following code (using a simple sorting rule for readability :-) ).

list1 = [1,2,5]
list2 = [2,3,4]
newlist = []

while list1 and list2:
    if list1[0] == list2[0]:
        newlist.append(list1.pop(0))
        list2.pop(0)
    elif list1[0] < list2[0]:
        newlist.append(list1.pop(0))
    else:
        newlist.append(list2.pop(0))

if list1:
    newlist.extend(list1)
if list2:
    newlist.extend(list2)

assert(newlist == [1, 2, 3, 4, 5])

Kasramvd · Answer 11 · 2015-07-06 20:06:35Z

As a more general way for more lists you can put them within a list and use itertools.chain.from_iterable()¹ function which based on THIS answer is the best way for flatting a nested list :

>>> l=[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9]]
>>> import itertools
>>> list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(l))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

_{1. Note that chain.from_iterable() is available in python =>2.6.In other versions use chain(*l)}

jpihl · Answer 12 · 2015-08-03 09:17:31Z

up vote 3 down vote

If you don't want to or can't use the plus operator (+), you can uses the __add__ function:

listone = [1,2,3]
listtwo = [4,5,6]

result = list.__add__(listone, listtwo)
print(result)

>>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

edited Aug 3 '15 at 9:17

answered Oct 20 '14 at 9:32

jpihl

1,439 1 12 23

add a comment

mingxiao · Answer 13 · 2013-07-16 02:02:49Z

up vote 2 down vote

You could use the append() method

mergedlist =[]
for elem in listone:
    mergedlist.append(elem)
for elem in listtwo:
    mergedlist.append(elem)

answered Jul 16 '13 at 2:02

mingxiao

412 4 17

4

just so you know, if this is what you're doing in practice, this is much, much slower than the other proposed methods. see stackoverflow.com/questions/17479361/… – Ryan Haining Jul 16 '13 at 2:10

add a comment

abh · Answer 14 · 2015-08-20 22:12:20Z

up vote 1 down vote

list1 = [1,2,3]
list2 = [4,5,6]

joinedlist = list1 + list2
#output : [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Yes, its that simple.

list1 + list2. This gives a new list that is the concatenation of list1 and list2

answered Aug 20 '15 at 22:12

abh

155 1 6

add a comment

shiminsh · Answer 15 · 2015-08-29 18:03:13Z

Joining two lists in Python:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> b = [1, 4, 6, 7]
>>> c = a + b 
>>> c
[1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 4, 6, 7]

If you don't want any duplication :

>>> a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
>>> b = [5, 6, 7, 8]
>>> c = list(set(a + b)) 
>>> c
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

wonder.mice · Answer 16 · 2015-11-18 01:11:35Z

This question directly asks about joining two lists. However it's pretty high in search even when you are looking for a way of joining many lists (including the case when you joining zero lists). Consider this more generic approach:

a = [[1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]]
reduce(lambda c, x: c + x, a, [])

Will output:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Note, this also works correctly when a is [] or [[1,2,3]].

Update

Consider better alternative suggested by Patrick Collins in the comments:

sum(a, [])

cleaner: sum(a, []) – Patrick Collins Nov 18 '15 at 1:07 — Patrick Collins, Nov 18 '15 at 1:07

How to append list to second list

How to append list to second list (concatenate lists)

17 Answers