Interleave multiple lists of the same length in Python

Question

In Python, is there a good way to interleave two lists of the same length?

Say I\'m given [1,2,3] and [10,20,30]. I\'d like to transform th

Answer 1

To answer the question's title of "Interleave multiple lists of the same length in Python", we can generalize the 2-list answer of @ekhumoro. This explicitly requires that the lists are the same length, unlike the (elegant) solution by @NPE

import itertools

def interleave(lists):
    """Interleave a list of lists.

    :param lists: List of lists; each inner length must be the same length.
    :returns: interleaved single list
    :rtype: list

    """
    if len(set(len(_) for _ in lists)) > 1:
        raise ValueError("Lists are not all the same length!")
    joint = list(itertools.chain(*lists))
    for l_idx, li in enumerate(lists):
        joint[l_idx::len(lists)] = li
    return joint

Examples:

>>> interleave([[0,2,4], [1, 3, 5]])
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
>>> interleave([[0,2,4], [1, 3, 5], [10, 11, 12]])
[0, 1, 10, 2, 3, 11, 4, 5, 12]
>>> interleave([[0,2,4], [1, 3, 5], [10, 11, 12], [13, 14, 15]])
[0, 1, 10, 13, 2, 3, 11, 14, 4, 5, 12, 15]
>>> interleave([[0,2,4], [1, 3, 5], [10, 11, 12], [13, 14]])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "", line 10, in interleave
ValueError: Lists are not all the same length!
>>> interleave([[0,2,4]])
[0, 2, 4]