Let’s say I have two lists, l1 and l2. I want to perform l1 - l2, which returns all elements of l1 not in l2.

I can think of a naive loop approach to doing this, but that is going to be really inefficient. What is a pythonic and efficient way of doing this?

As an example, if I have l1 = [1,2,6,8] and l2 = [2,3,5,8], l1 - l2 should return [1,6]

Python has a language feature called List Comprehensions that is perfectly suited to making this sort of thing extremely easy. The following statement does exactly what you want and stores the result in l3:

l3 = [x for x in l1 if x not in l2]

l3 will contain [1, 6].

One way is to use sets:

>>> set([1,2,6,8]) - set([2,3,5,8])
set([1, 6])

As an alternative, you may also use filter with the lambda expression to get the desired result. For example:

>>> l1 = [1,2,6,8]
>>> l2 = set([2,3,5,8])

#     v  `filter` returns the a iterator object. Here I'm type-casting 
#     v  it to `list` in order to display the resultant value
>>> list(filter(lambda x: x not in l2, l1))
[1, 6]

Performance Comparison

Here I am comparing the performance of all the answers mentioned here. As expected, Arkku’s set based operation is fastest.

• Arkku’s Set Difference – First (0.124 usec per loop)

  mquadri$ python -m timeit -s "l1 = set([1,2,6,8]); l2 = set([2,3,5,8]);" "l1 - l2"
  10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.124 usec per loop
  

• Daniel Pryden’s List Comprehension with set lookup – Second (0.302 usec per loop)

  mquadri$ python -m timeit -s "l1 = [1,2,6,8]; l2 = set([2,3,5,8]);" "[x for x in l1 if x not in l2]"
  1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.302 usec per loop
  

• Donut’s List Comprehension on plain list – Third (0.552 usec per loop)

  mquadri$ python -m timeit -s "l1 = [1,2,6,8]; l2 = [2,3,5,8];" "[x for x in l1 if x not in l2]"
  1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.552 usec per loop
  

• Moinuddin Quadri’s using filter – Fourth (0.972 usec per loop)

  mquadri$ python -m timeit -s "l1 = [1,2,6,8]; l2 = set([2,3,5,8]);" "filter(lambda x: x not in l2, l1)"
  1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.972 usec per loop
  

• Akshay Hazari’s using combination of reduce + filter – Fifth (3.97 usec per loop)

  mquadri$ python -m timeit "l1 = [1,2,6,8]; l2 = [2,3,5,8];" "reduce(lambda x,y : filter(lambda z: z!=y,x) ,l1,l2)"
  100000 loops, best of 3: 3.97 usec per loop
  

PS: set does not maintain the order and removes the duplicate elements from the list. Hence, do not use set difference if you need any of these.

Expanding on Donut’s answer and the other answers here, you can get even better results by using a generator comprehension instead of a list comprehension, and by using a set data structure (since the in operator is O(n) on a list but O(1) on a set).

So here’s a function that would work for you:

def filter_list(full_list, excludes):
    s = set(excludes)
    return (x for x in full_list if x not in s)

The result will be an iterable that will lazily fetch the filtered list. If you need a real list object (e.g. if you need to do a len() on the result), then you can easily build a list like so:

filtered_list = list(filter_list(full_list, excludes))

Use the Python set type. That would be the most Pythonic. :)

Also, since it’s native, it should be the most optimized method too.

See:

http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#set

http://docs.python.org/library/sets.htm (for older python)

# Using Python 2.7 set literal format.
# Otherwise, use: l1 = set([1,2,6,8])
#
l1 = {1,2,6,8}
l2 = {2,3,5,8}
l3 = l1 - l2

use Set Comprehensions {x for x in l2} or set(l2) to get set, then use List Comprehensions to get list

l2set = set(l2)
l3 = [x for x in l1 if x not in l2set]

benchmark test code:

import time

l1 = list(range(1000*10 * 3))
l2 = list(range(1000*10 * 2))

l2set = {x for x in l2}

tic = time.time()
l3 = [x for x in l1 if x not in l2set]
toc = time.time()
diffset = toc-tic
print(diffset)

tic = time.time()
l3 = [x for x in l1 if x not in l2]
toc = time.time()
difflist = toc-tic
print(difflist)

print("speedup %fx"%(difflist/diffset))

benchmark test result:

0.0015058517456054688
3.968189239501953
speedup 2635.179227x    

Alternate Solution :

reduce(lambda x,y : filter(lambda z: z!=y,x) ,[2,3,5,8],[1,2,6,8])