<s>[INST] Making a flat list out of list of lists in Python I wonder whether there is a shortcut to make a simple list out of list of lists in Python.
I can do that in a for loop, but maybe there is some cool "one-liner"? I tried it with reduce, but I get an error.
Code
l = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7], [8, 9]]
reduce(lambda x, y: x.extend(y), l)

Error message
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <lambda>
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'extend'

 [/INST] [item for sublist in l for item in sublist]

is faster than the shortcuts posted so far. (l is the list to flatten.)
For evidence, as always, you can use the timeit module in the standard library:
$ python -mtimeit -s'l=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6], [7], [8,9]]*99' '[item for sublist in l for item in sublist]'
10000 loops, best of 3: 143 usec per loop
$ python -mtimeit -s'l=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6], [7], [8,9]]*99' 'sum(l, [])'
1000 loops, best of 3: 969 usec per loop
$ python -mtimeit -s'l=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6], [7], [8,9]]*99' 'reduce(lambda x,y: x+y,l)'
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.1 msec per loop

Explanation: the shortcuts based on + (including the implied use in sum) are, of necessity, O(L**2) when there are L sublists -- as the intermediate result list keeps getting longer, at each step a new intermediate result list object gets allocated, and all the items in the previous intermediate result must be copied over (as well as a few new ones added at the end). So (for simplicity and without actual loss of generality) say you have L sublists of I items each: the first I items are copied back and forth L-1 times, the second I items L-2 times, and so on; total number of copies is I times the sum of x for x from 1 to L excluded, i.e., I * (L**2)/2.
The list comprehension just generates one list, once, and copies each item over (from its original place of residence to the result list) also exactly once.
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