Flattening a List of Lists in Python (Overview)
Sometimes, when you’re working with data, you may have the data as a list of nested lists. A common operation is to flatten this data into a one-dimensional list in Python. Flattening a list involves converting a multidimensional list, such as a matrix, into a one-dimensional list.
In this video course, you’ll learn how to do that in Python.
00:00
Welcome to Flattening a List of Lists in Python My name is Christopher and I will be your guide. In this course, you’ll learn about flattening nested lists, how to use iterators, the chain(), and reduce() functions, and how to time your code in order to determine its performance.
00:18 The code in this course was tested using Python 3.12. All the code should work with any Python 3. There are a few small references to functions available in specific Python versions, but I’ll point them out as I go along.
00:35 A list of lists is a common data structure, but doing data analysis on a list of lists can be expensive. Many tools expect a stream of values, and the additional structure of a nested list means you can’t use these tools directly.
00:50 The answer is to flatten your list of lists, creating a single list comprised of the values found inside the nested inner lists, essentially removing the inner structure of the original.
01:01 There are many different ways to flatten a list of lists, and I’ll be covering several approaches and why you might choose one over the other.
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