10ninox/_posts/2014-and-prior/2013-11-20-python-benchmark.md

layout	status	published	title	author	date	categories	tags
post	publish	true	Python: Performance Benchmark	[{display_name sipp11}]	2013-11-20	[coding]	python benchmark

`[item for sublist in l for item in sublist] is faster than the shortcuts posted so far.

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