How to Efficiently Pair Permutations from Lists of Disparate Lengths?

Efficiently Pairing Permutations from Disparate Lists

Your aim is to generate unique combinations of elements from two lists, with the number of pairings guided by the length of the shorter list. Let's illustrate this concept:

Consider two lists:

names = ['a', 'b']
numbers = [1, 2]

The desired output would be:

[('a', 1), ('b', 2)]
[('b', 1), ('a', 2)]

To achieve this, you can harness the power of Python's itertools.product. Here's how it works:

<code class="python">from itertools import product

a = ['foo', 'melon']
b = [True, False]
c = list(product(a, b))</code>

By utilizing product, you obtain all possible pairwise combinations:

[('foo', True), ('foo', False), ('melon', True), ('melon', False)]

In scenarios where one list is longer than the other (e.g., names has three elements while numbers has only two), the permutations will still be calculated based on the shorter list:

names = ['a', 'b', 'c']
numbers = [1, 2]

Expected output:

[('a', 1), ('b', 2)]
[('b', 1), ('a', 2)]
[('a', 1), ('c', 2)]
[('c', 1), ('a', 2)]
[('b', 1), ('c', 2)]
[('c', 1), ('b', 2)]

This approach ensures you obtain all possible combinations necessary for your specific use case, regardless of the relative lengths of the input lists.

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