Pad a ragged multidimensional array to rectangular shape For some machine learning purpose, I need to work with sequences with different lengths. To be able to process efficiently those sequences, I need to process them in batches of size size_batch. A batch typically has 4 dimensions and I want to convert it to a numpy's ndarray with 4 dimensions. For each sequence, I need to pad with some defined pad_value such that each element has the same size: the maximal size.

For example, with 3 dimensional input:

[[[0, 1, 2],
  [3],
  [4, 5]],
 [[6]],
 [[7, 8],
  [9]]]


desired output for pad_value -1 is:

[[[0, 1, 2],
  [3, -1, -1],
  [4, 5, -1]],
 [[6, -1, -1],
  [-1, -1, -1],
  [-1, -1, -1]]
 [[7, 8, -1],
  [9, -1, -1],
  [-1, -1, -1]]]


which has shape (3, 3, 3).
For this problem, one can assume that there are no empty lists in the input.
Here is the solution I came up with:

import numpy as np
import itertools as it
from typing import List

def pad(array: List, pad_value: np.int32, dtype: type = np.int32) -&gt; np.ndarray:
    """ Pads a nested list to the max shape and fill empty values with pad_value

    :param array: high dimensional list to be padded
    :param pad_value: value appended to
    :param dtype: type of the output
    :return: padded copy of param array
    """
    # Get max shape
    def get_max_shape(arr, ax=0, dims=[]):
        try:
            if ax &gt;= len(dims):
                dims.append(len(arr))
            else:
                dims[ax] = max(dims[ax], len(arr))

            for i in arr:
                get_max_shape(i, ax+1, dims)
        except TypeError:  # On non iterable / lengthless objects (leaves)
            pass

        return dims

    dims = get_max_shape(array)

    # Pad values
    def get_item(arr, idx):
        while True:
            i, *idx = idx
            arr = arr[i]
            if not idx:
                break
        return arr

    r = np.zeros(dims, dtype=dtype) + pad_value
    for idx in it.product(*map(range, dims)):
        # idx run though all possible tuple of indices that might 
        # contain a value in array
        try:
            r[idx] = get_item(array, idx)
        except IndexError:
            continue

    return r


It does not feel really pythonic but does the job. Is there any better way to do it I should know ? I think I might be able to improve its speed by doing smart breaks in the last loop but I haven't dug much yet.
nested methods

Why do you nest the get_max_shape etcetera in the pad? There is no need to do this.

get_max_shape

Here you use recursion and a global variable. A simpler way would be to have a generator that recursively runs through the array, and yields the level and length of that part, and then another function to aggregate this results. That way you can avoid passing 

def get_dimensions(array, level=0):
    yield level, len(array)
    try:
        for row in array:
            yield from get_dimensions(row, level + 1)
    except TypeError: #not an iterable
        pass



[(0, 3), (1, 3), (2, 3), (2, 1), (2, 2), (1, 1), (2, 1), (1, 2), (2, 2), (2, 1)]



The aggregation can be very simple using collections.defaultdict:

def get_max_shape(array):
    dimensions = defaultdict(int)
    for level, length in get_dimensions(array):
        dimensions[level] = max(dimensions[level], length)
    return [value for _, value in sorted(dimensions.items())]



[3, 3, 3]



creating the result

Instead of r = np.zeros(dims, dtype=dtype) + pad_value you can use np.full

You iterate over all possible indices, and check whether it is present in the original array. Depening on how "full" the original array is, this can save some time. It also allows you to do this without your custom get_item method to get the element at the nested index

def iterate_nested_array(array, index=()):
    try:
        for idx, row in enumerate(array):
            yield from iterate_nested_array(row, (*index, idx))
    except TypeError: # final level
        for idx, item in enumerate(array):
            yield (*index, idx), item



[((0, 0, 0), 0),
 ((0, 0, 1), 1),
 ((0, 0, 2), 2),
 ((0, 1, 0), 3),
 ((0, 2, 0), 4),
 ((0, 2, 1), 5),
 ((1, 0, 0), 6),
 ((2, 0, 0), 7),
 ((2, 0, 1), 8),
 ((2, 1, 0), 9)]



slice

an even better way, as suggested by@hpaulj uses slices:

def iterate_nested_array(array, index=()):
    try:
        for idx, row in enumerate(array):
            yield from iterate_nested_array(row, (*index, idx))
    except TypeError: # final level            
        yield (*index, slice(len(array))), array



[((0, 0, slice(None, 3, None)), [0, 1, 2]),
 ((0, 1, slice(None, 1, None)), [3]),
 ((0, 2, slice(None, 2, None)), [4, 5]),
 ((1, 0, slice(None, 1, None)), [6]),
 ((2, 0, slice(None, 2, None)), [7, 8]),
 ((2, 1, slice(None, 1, None)), [9])]



padding

def pad(array, fill_value):
    dimensions = get_max_shape(array)
    result = np.full(dimensions, fill_value)
    for index, value in iterate_nested_array(array):
        result[index] = value
    return result



array([[[ 0,  1,  2],
        [ 3, -1, -1],
        [ 4,  5, -1]],

       [[ 6, -1, -1],
        [-1, -1, -1],
        [-1, -1, -1]],

       [[ 7,  8, -1],
        [ 9, -1, -1],
        [-1, -1, -1]]])