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

Feels a bit un-pythonic not to consider the double-list-comprehension answer here, to handle n string with O(1) effort:

"".join(c for cs in itertools.zip_longest(*all_strings) for c in cs)

where all_strings is a list of the strings you want to interleave. In your case, all_strings = [u, l]. A full use example would look like this:

import itertools
a = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
b = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
all_strings = [a,b]
interleaved = "".join(c for cs in itertools.zip_longest(*all_strings) for c in cs)
print(interleaved)
# 'AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz'

Like many answers, fastest? Probably not, but simple and flexible. Also, without too much added complexity, this is slightly faster than the accepted answer (in general, string addition is a bit slow in python):

In [7]: l1 = 'A' * 1000000; l2 = 'a' * 1000000;

In [8]: %timeit "".join(a + b for i, j in zip(l1, l2))
1 loops, best of 3: 227 ms per loop

In [9]: %timeit "".join(c for cs in zip(*(l1, l2)) for c in cs)
1 loops, best of 3: 198 ms per loop