Mathematica Tutorial

Rearranging Nested Lists

You will encounter nested lists if you use matrices or generate multidimensional arrays and tables. Mathematica provides many functions for handling such lists.

Flatten[list]	flatten out all levels in list
Flatten[list,n]	flatten out the top n levels in list
Partition[list,{n₁,n₂,...}]	partition into blocks of size n₁×n₂×...
Transpose[list]	interchange the top two levels of lists
RotateLeft[list,{n₁,n₂,...}]	rotate successive levels by n_i places
PadLeft[list,{n₁,n₂,...}]	pad successive levels to be length n_i

A few functions for rearranging nested lists.

This "flattens out" sublists. You can think of it as effectively just removing all inner braces.

In[1]:=

Out[1]=

This flattens out only one level of sublists.

In[2]:=

Out[2]=

There are many other operations you can perform on nested lists. We will discuss more of them in "Manipulating Lists".