title: interlacing strings in python
body: <p>I had a question for a test where I had to interlace letters from two strings into one, I did it using the following code: </p>
  
  <p>'abcd' and 'efghi' -> 'aebfcgdhi'</p>
  
  <pre><code>s1,s2='abcd' ,'efghi'
  t=[a+b for a,b in zip(s1, s2) ]
  ls1 = len(s1)
  ls2 = len(s2)
  if ls1 &gt; ls2:
      t.extend(s1[ls2:])
  elif ls1 &lt; ls2:
      t.extend(s2[ls1:])
  print ''.join(t)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I first tried using the following which seems to work only when strings are the same length or s2 is the longer string. </p>
  
  <pre><code> print  ''.join([a+b for a,b in zip(s1, s2)]) + max(s1,s2)[min(len(s1),len(s2)):]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Where did I go wrong in my logic?</p>