Python : Recursively flatten a list [duplicate]

Answer 1

If you want to flatten arbitrarily nested iterables, you could try this function:

def flatten(x):
    try:
        it = iter(x)
    except TypeError:
        yield x
    else:
        for i in it:
            for j in flatten(i):
                yield j

Example:

a = [2, 9, [1, 13], 8, 6]
list(flatten(a))
# [2, 9, 1, 13, 8, 6]

Note that the function would also flatten out strings to single characters.