How to Link Any Type of Data Objects Together in Python

In this article, we show how to link any type of data objects together in Python.

Let's say, you have a program with various lists, for example, list1, list2, and list3.

In Python, using the itertools module, we can link these lists together and have it as if it were a single list. The advantages of this is that we can have all the lists linked and can do things such as search the list cumulatively, searching all the individual lists. Or we can list all elements of this combined list with a single for loop.

We can do the same with any other type of data types, such as sets, tuples, etc.

We do the linking of these data types by using the chain() function in the Python itertools module.

Below we have a program that has 4 lists. We link all of these lists together and then use a for loop to display all of the elements in this linked list.

from itertools import * list1= [1,2] list2= [11,12] list3= [19,20] list4= [27,28] cumulativelist= chain(list1,list2,list3,list4) >>> cumulativelist <itertools.chain object at 0x033C9820> >>> for i in cumulativelist: print(i) 1 2 11 12 19 20 27 28

So you see we linked all 4 lists together into one list, cumulativelist, using the chain() function.

Within the chain() function, you pass in all of the data elements you want to link together. In this case, it is list1, list2, list3, and list4.

When we type in, cumulativelist, we see that it is a chain object of the itertools module.

We then use a basic for loop to iterate through all of the elements in this cumulative list.

We see it contains and shows all of the elements in all of the 4 lists that we combined.

Below we use the chain() function to link together sets.

from itertools import * set1= set() set1.add("Lion") set1.add("Tiger") >>> set1 {'Tiger', 'Lion'} set2= set() set2.add("Giraffe") set2.add("Zebra") >>> set2 {'Zebra', 'Giraffe'} cumulativeset= chain(set1,set2) >>> for i in cumulativeset: print(i) Tiger Lion Zebra Giraffe #Searching a cumulative set allelements= set(cumulativeset) >>> allelements {'Tiger', 'Zebra', 'Lion', 'Giraffe'} >>> if 'Tiger' in allelements: print("Yes") else: print("No") Yes

So we have 2 sets in our program, set1 and set2.

We create a variable, cumulativeset, and set it equal to, chain(set1,set2)

This creates a set containing all distinct elements in set1 and set2.

We then show all elements in this set, which is all elements in set1 and set2.

If we want to go further now and search the cumulative set, we can't do this directly because if you type in, cumulativeset, in the Python program, it doesn't return all of the elements in the set, but returns,

So if you were to use an if statement to search through this cumulative set, it doesn't contain the elements in the set, but simply that it's a chain object of the itertools.

Therefore, to search a cumulative data object composed of individual data objects, create a new variable that will hold the elements of the linked sets and use the Python set() function to convert it into a set. Now this data object contains all elements of the individual data elements and now you can now search through the entire cumulative set. If you were creating a list instead of a set, you would use the Python list() function.

And this is how you can link any type of data object together in Python.

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