Most pythonic way to interleave two strings

Question

What\'s the most pythonic way to mesh two strings together?

For example:

Input:

u = \'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ\'
l = \'abcdefghijklmnopqrst         


        

Answer 1

A lot of these suggestions assume the strings are of equal length. Maybe that covers all reasonable use cases, but at least to me it seems that you might want to accomodate strings of differing lengths too. Or am I the only one thinking the mesh should work a bit like this:

u = "foobar"
l = "baz"
mesh(u,l) = "fboaozbar"

One way to do this would be the following:

def mesh(a,b):
    minlen = min(len(a),len(b))
    return "".join(["".join(x+y for x,y in zip(a,b)),a[minlen:],b[minlen:]])