determine if a list contains other lists
Question:
if I have a list, is there any way to check if it contains any other lists?
what i mean to say is, I want to know if a list has this strcuture: [] as opposed to this structure [[]]
so, compare [1,2,3,4] to [1,[2,3],4]
this is complicated by the fact that i have a list of strings.
well, phihag’s solution seems to be working so far, but what I’m doing is this:
uniqueCrossTabs = list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(uniqueCrossTabs))
in order to flatten a list if it has other lists in it.
But since my list contains strings, if this is done on an already flattened list, I get a list of each character of each string that was in the original list.
This is not the behavior i was looking for. so, checking to see if the list needs to be flattened before flattening is neccessary.
Answers:
lst1 in lst2
Yields True iff lst1 is in lst2.
any(isinstance(el, list) for el in input_list)
You can take phihag’s answer even further if you actually want a list of all the lists inside the list:
output_list = filter( lambda x: isinstance(x,list), input_list)
if I have a list, is there any way to check if it contains any other lists?
what i mean to say is, I want to know if a list has this strcuture: [] as opposed to this structure [[]]
so, compare [1,2,3,4] to [1,[2,3],4]
this is complicated by the fact that i have a list of strings.
well, phihag’s solution seems to be working so far, but what I’m doing is this:
uniqueCrossTabs = list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(uniqueCrossTabs))
in order to flatten a list if it has other lists in it.
But since my list contains strings, if this is done on an already flattened list, I get a list of each character of each string that was in the original list.
This is not the behavior i was looking for. so, checking to see if the list needs to be flattened before flattening is neccessary.
lst1 in lst2
Yields True iff lst1 is in lst2.
any(isinstance(el, list) for el in input_list)
You can take phihag’s answer even further if you actually want a list of all the lists inside the list:
output_list = filter( lambda x: isinstance(x,list), input_list)