I was recently asked to take two lists and interleave them. Although I can not think of a scenario off the top of my head where this might be useful, it doesn't strike me as a completely silly thing to do. StackOverflow's top answer for this problem uses itertools.chain.from_iterable() and itertools.izip() (which is just the builtin zip() in Python 3) to do this. This answer runs into the problem of how to handle variable length arrays. Fortunately, we have itertools.izip_longest() (and itertools.zip_longest() in Python 3) for that!

a = [ 1, 2, 3 ]
b = [ 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd' ]

from itertools import chain, izip_longest

c = list(chain.from_iterable(izip_longest(a, b)))
# [1, 'a', 2, 'b', 3, 'c', None, 'd']

[ x for x in c if x is not None ]
# [1, 'a', 2, 'b', 3, 'c', 'd']

It is important to note here that the default fill value for izip_longest() is None. That creates an item in our array with the None value. Usually, we could just use filter() to return the list with all false values removed, but there might be a case where our list contains 0, False, or ''.

To work around that, we use the final list comprehension to remove all the None values specifically. In the case where we actually want None values, we would need to give izip_longest() a garbage fill value that can not possibly appear in our dataset and then work from there.