Slicing Python list of strings into individual characters

[perfringo]

I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you say “consume the iterator”. You explained that print(list(flat_list)) wouldn’t work because the last was supposed to be already exhausted. But I entered each line into my Python interpreter and there was no traceback or issue presented.

There is subtle difference in here:

In [8]: from itertools import chain                                                                                             

In [9]: flat_list = chain.from_iterable(['apples', 'bananas', 'oranges'])                                                       

In [10]: print(flat_list)                    # printing out object, not consuming iterator                                                                                
<itertools.chain object at 0x10cd56048>       

In [11]: list(flat_list)                     # consuming iterator i.e. iterating over and creating list                                                                                  
Out[11]: 
['a', /../  's']

In [12]: list(flat_list)                     # consuming exhausted iterator                                                                                                                 
Out[12]: []

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I’m trying to get slice a list of strings into individual characters ...but using slicing.

I observed that there is no answer to original question. I have no idea why would anyone want to do it as there are built-in tools for that. However, following silly code uses slicing as aftertought to get list of individual characters:

 
>>> lst = ['apples', 'bananas', 'oranges']
>>> [fruit[i:i+1] for fruit in lst for i in range(len(fruit))]