Handling Unequal Length Iterables with FillValue

This function implements similar functionality to the zip function but can handle iterables of unequal length and can use fillvalue to fill in missing values.

Technology Stack : itertools

Code Type : Function

Code Difficulty : Intermediate

                
                    
def zip_longest(*iterables, fillvalue=None):
    """
    Zip the iterables together into a single iterable.
    The returned iterable is an iterator of tuples, where the i-th tuple contains
    the i-th element from each of the argument iterables. The iterator stops when the
    shortest iterable is exhausted, but additional elements from the longer iterables
    are filled in with fillvalue.
    """
    iterators = [iter(it) for it in iterables]
    for i, it in enumerate(iterators):
        if not it:
            iterators[i] = iter([fillvalue])

    while True:
        result = []
        for it in iterators:
            result.append(next(it, fillvalue))
        yield tuple(result)