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POCode golf: combining multiple sorted lists into a single sorted list
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  1. POCode golf: combining multiple sorted lists into a single sorted list
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    copied!<p>Implement an algorithm to merge an arbitrary number of sorted lists into one sorted list. The aim is to create the smallest working programme, in whatever language you like.</p> <p>For example:</p> <pre><code>input: ((1, 4, 7), (2, 5, 8), (3, 6, 9)) output: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) input: ((1, 10), (), (2, 5, 6, 7)) output: (1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 10) </code></pre> <p><strong>Note</strong>: solutions which concatenate the input lists then use a language-provided sort function are not in-keeping with the spirit of golf, and will not be accepted:</p> <pre><code>sorted(sum(lists,[])) # cheating: out of bounds! </code></pre> <p>Apart from anything else, your algorithm <em>should</em> be (but doesn't have to be) a lot faster!</p> <p>Clearly state the language, any foibles and the character count. Only include meaningful characters in the count, but feel free to add whitespace to the code for artistic / readability purposes.</p> <p>To keep things tidy, suggest improvement in comments or by editing answers where appropriate, rather than creating a new answer for each "revision".</p> <p><strong>EDIT</strong>: if I was submitting this question again, I would expand on the "no language provided sort" rule to be "don't concatenate all the lists then sort the result". Existing entries which do concatenate-then-sort are actually very interesting and compact, so I won't retro-actively introduce a rule they break, but feel free to work to the more restrictive spec in new submissions.</p> <hr> <p>Inspired by <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/464342/combining-two-sorted-lists-in-python">Combining two sorted lists in Python</a></p>
 

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