Unpacking a list of lists

Question

I am extracting a dictionary that's giving me this output:

mylist= [[u'Ann', u'jOhn', u'Clive'], [u'124street', u'32B', u'16eve', u'beach']]

When I try to separate it into two, I get a ValueError:

nest1, nest2 = zip(*mylist)

ValueError: too many values to unpack

Ultimately I need something like this:

nest1=['Ann', 'jOhn', 'Clive']
nest2=['124Street', '32B', '16eve', 'beach]

I found zip(*mylist) within this answer.

Why not just `nest1, nest2 = mylist` ? – khelwood Jul 25 '17 at 07:52 — khelwood, Jul 25 '17 at 07:52
@khelwood it worked many thanks – Ahsan Naseem Jul 25 '17 at 07:58 — Ahsan Naseem, Jul 25 '17 at 07:58

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 25 '17 at 07:55

*zip is meant to be used to unpack lists of tuples. In your case, there is no unpacking needed to be done, so just unpack the list itself:

In [473]: x, y = [[u'Ann', u'jOhn', u'Clive'], [u'124street', u'32B', u'16eve', u'beach']]

In [474]: x
Out[474]: ['Ann', 'jOhn', 'Clive']

In [475]: y
Out[475]: ['124street', '32B', '16eve', 'beach']

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 25 '17 at 08:03

Try this

mylist= [[u'Ann', u'jOhn', u'Clive'], [u'124street', u'32B', u'16eve', u'beach']]
nest1 = mylist[0]
nest2 = mylist[1]
print("nest1={}".format(nest1))
print("nest2={}".format(nest2))

Outputs:

nest1=['Ann', 'jOhn', 'Clive']
nest2=['124street', '32B', '16eve', 'beach']

Unpacking a list of lists

2 Answers2