How to elegantly interleave two lists of uneven length in python?

Question

I want to merge two lists in python, with the lists being of different lengths, so that the elements of the shorter list are as equally spaced within the final list as possi

Answer 1

If we modify @Jon's answer like this

from itertools import count
import heapq

[x[1] for x in heapq.merge(izip(count(0, len(b)), a), izip(count(0, len(a)), b))]

It doesn't matter which of a/b is longest