pairwise combination of two lists

[Ian Kelly]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 4:22 PM, Yingjie Lin <Yingjie.Lin at mssm.edu> wrote:
> Hi Python users,
>
> I have two lists:
>
> li1 = ['a', 'b']
> li2 = ['1', '2']
>
> and I wish to obtain a list like this
>
> li3 = ['a1', 'a2', 'b1', 'b2']
>
> Is there a handy and efficient function to do this, especially when li1 and li2 are long lists.
> I found zip() but it only gives [('a', '1'), ('b', '2')],  not exactly what I am looking for.

Use the "roundrobin" recipe from the itertools documentation.

Cheers,
Ian