Python – Flatten List to individual elements

Sometimes, while working with a Python list, we can have a problem in which we need to perform flattening,i.e., of the list, i.e. convert a mixed list to a flattened one. This can have applications in domains that use 1D lists as input. Let’s discuss certain ways in which this task can be performed.

Input: [[1,3, "Lazyroar"], [4,5], [6, "best"]]
Output: [1, 3, 'Lazyroar', 4, 5, 6, 'best']
Explaination: flattening  Convert a mixed list to a flattened one.

Flatten the List to Individual Element

Below are the methods that we will cover in this article:

• Flatten List using list comprehension
• Flatten List using sum()
• Flatten List using loop
• Flatten List using flatten() method
• Flatten List using chain() with isinstance() 
• Flatten List using reduce() function

Flatten List using list comprehension

Here, we are using list comprehension to flatten the list from 2D to 1D.

Output:

[1, 3, 'Lazyroar', 4, 5, 6, 'best']

Time Complexity: O(n) where n is the number of elements in the list 
Auxiliary Space: O(n) where n is the number of elements in the list 

Flatten List using sum()

Here, we are using the sum() function in which we passed test_list as an iterable object as the first parameter and the second parameter as an empty list in which it stores the element.

Output:

[1, 3, 'gfg', 4, 5, 6, 'best']

Time Complexity: O(n), where n is the length of the list test_list.
Auxiliary Space: O(n) additional space of size n is created where n is the number of elements in the list

Flatten List using loop

The combination of the above functionalities can be used to perform this task. In this, we check for an instance of the list and flatten it, and the rest of the elements we add to the list brutely. 

Output:

The List after flattening : [‘gfg’, 1, 5, 6, ‘Lazyroar’, 67.4, 5, ‘best’]

Time complexity: of this function is O(n), where n is the total number of elements in the nested list. 

Space complexity: of this function is also O(n), as a new list temp is created for each recursive call to store the flattened sublist, and the final flattened list is stored in the res variable.

Flatten List using flatten() method

Pandas flatten return a copy of the array collapsed into one dimension.

Output:

[1, 3, 'gfg', 4, 5, 6, 'best']

Flatten List using chain() with isinstance() 

This is yet another way in which this task can be performed. In this, which we perform the task of iteration using chain() and checking for list instances, which is done using isinstance(). 

Output :

The List after flattening : [‘gfg’, 1, 5, 6, ‘Lazyroar’, 67.4, 5, ‘best’]

Time complexity: O(n)
Auxiliary Space: O(n)

Flatten List using reduce() function

The reduce() function is defined in the “functools” module. It applies a function of two arguments continuously on the given sequence and returns a single value.

The List after flattening : [1, 3, 'gfg', 4, 5, 6, 'best']

Time complexity: O(n)
Auxiliary Space: O(n)

Flatten List to individual elements using  groupby:

Import the groupby module from itertools.Define a test_list of lists.Define a res variable as an empty list.Use a nested for loop to iterate over the elements of the test_list.For each element, check if it is a list or not.If it is a list, then iterate over each element of the list and append it to the res variable.If it is not a list, append the element directly to the res variable.

Print the res variable as the flattened list.

The List after flattening : [1, 3, 'gfg', 4, 5, 6, 'best']

Time Complexity:
The time complexity of the code is O(n), where n is the number of elements in the input list. The nested loop iterates over each element of the input list exactly once.

Space Complexity:
The space complexity of the code is O(n), where n is the number of elements in the input list. The res variable is used to store the flattened list, which can have at most n elements.