Zipping in Python is a Concise Way to Merge Iterables

In programming, zipping two lists together often refers to combining data from separate iterable objects into single entities. This is done using the built-in function zip() in Python. Here’s how to u …

Updated October 12, 2023

Zipping in Python is a concise and efficient way to merge multiple lists or tuples, which can be used as arguments for the zip() function. The output of this operation is an iterator that aggregates elements from each of the input iterables.

Here’s how you could use it:

# example usage
list1 = [1, 2, 3]
list2 = ['a', 'b', 'c']
zipped_lists = zip(list1, list2)
for pair in zipped_lists:
    print(pair)

Outputs: (1, 'a') (2, 'b') (3, 'c') The order of the elements is preserved according to their original lists. If you want to convert these pairs into a list (or other data structures), you could do so using list() function as follows:

# convert zip object back to list
zipped_lists = list(zip(list1, list2))
print(zipped_lists)

Outputs: [(1, 'a'), (2, 'b'), (3, 'c')] As you can see, the output is a list of tuples, where each tuple represents a pair of elements from original lists. This method is especially useful when you have multiple iterables that need to be paired together, and you want all these pairs processed in one pass.