When working with lists, there are two member functions of interest: list.append(obj) - Appends a single object to a list. If obj happens to be a list, it will become a list-within-a-list list.extend(list_2) - Adds every item in list_2 to the list Basically, what I want to do is this: list = [] try: iter(something) list.extend(something) except TypeError: list.append(something) but in some simple one-line fashion. Does such syntax exist? Continue reading...