Flattening Lists
Explore how to flatten deeply nested lists in Python through fully recursive and optimized recursive solutions. Understand dividing lists into head and tail, stopping conditions, and controlling recursion depth to handle any nested structure effectively.
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Fully recursive solution
Consider this list:
[1, [2, 3], 4, [[5, 6], 7]]
This list contains a mixture of integers and lists. These lists can also contain a mixture of integers and lists, and, in fact, the whole thing can be nested to any depth. You want to flatten this into a single list containing all the integers in the order they occur in the original unflattened list, as shown here:
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
This is quite interesting because it is hard to come up with a solution that doesn’t involve recursion. But there are different degrees to which you can use recursion ...