Pretty much I need to write a program to check if a list has any duplicates and if it does it removes them and returns a new list with the items that weren’t duplicated/removed. This is what I have but to be honest I do not know what to do.

def remove_duplicates():
    t = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
    t2 = ['a', 'c', 'd']
    for t in t2:
        t.append(t.remove())
    return t

The common approach to get a unique collection of items is to use a set. Sets are unordered collections of distinct objects. To create a set from any iterable, you can simply pass it to the built-in set() function. If you later need a real list again, you can similarly pass the set to the list() function.

The following example should cover whatever you are trying to do:

>>> t = [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8]
>>> t
[1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8]
>>> list(set(t))
[1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8]
>>> s = [1, 2, 3]
>>> list(set(t) - set(s))
[8, 5, 6, 7]

As you can see from the example result, the original order is not maintained. As mentioned above, sets themselves are unordered collections, so the order is lost. When converting a set back to a list, an arbitrary order is created.

Maintaining order

If order is important to you, then you will have to use a different mechanism. A very common solution for this is to rely on OrderedDict to keep the order of keys during insertion:

>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> list(OrderedDict.fromkeys(t))
[1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8]

Starting with Python 3.7, the built-in dictionary is guaranteed to maintain the insertion order as well, so you can also use that directly if you are on Python 3.7 or later (or CPython 3.6):

>>> list(dict.fromkeys(t))
[1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8]

Note that this may have some overhead of creating a dictionary first, and then creating a list from it. If you don’t actually need to preserve the order, you’re often better off using a set, especially because it gives you a lot more operations to work with. Check out this question for more details and alternative ways to preserve the order when removing duplicates.

Finally note that both the set as well as the OrderedDict/dict solutions require your items to be hashable. This usually means that they have to be immutable. If you have to deal with items that are not hashable (e.g. list objects), then you will have to use a slow approach in which you will basically have to compare every item with every other item in a nested loop.

In Python 2.7, the new way of removing duplicates from an iterable while keeping it in the original order is:

>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> list(OrderedDict.fromkeys('abracadabra'))
['a', 'b', 'r', 'c', 'd']

In Python 3.5, the OrderedDict has a C implementation. My timings show that this is now both the fastest and shortest of the various approaches for Python 3.5.

In Python 3.6, the regular dict became both ordered and compact. (This feature is holds for CPython and PyPy but may not present in other implementations). That gives us a new fastest way of deduping while retaining order:

>>> list(dict.fromkeys('abracadabra'))
['a', 'b', 'r', 'c', 'd']

In Python 3.7, the regular dict is guaranteed to both ordered across all implementations. So, the shortest and fastest solution is:

>>> list(dict.fromkeys('abracadabra'))
['a', 'b', 'r', 'c', 'd']

It’s a one-liner: list(set(source_list)) will do the trick.

A set is something that can’t possibly have duplicates.

Update: an order-preserving approach is two lines:

from collections import OrderedDict
OrderedDict((x, True) for x in source_list).keys()

Here we use the fact that OrderedDict remembers the insertion order of keys, and does not change it when a value at a particular key is updated. We insert True as values, but we could insert anything, values are just not used. (set works a lot like a dict with ignored values, too.)

>>> t = [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8]
>>> t
[1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8]
>>> s = []
>>> for i in t:
       if i not in s:
          s.append(i)
>>> s
[1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8]

If you don’t care about the order, just do this:

def remove_duplicates(l):
    return list(set(l))

A set is guaranteed to not have duplicates.

To make a new list retaining the order of first elements of duplicates in L

newlist=[ii for n,ii in enumerate(L) if ii not in L[:n]]

for example if L=[1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 4, 3, 5] then newlist will be [1,2,3,4,5]

This checks each new element has not appeared previously in the list before adding it. Also it does not need imports.

A colleague have sent the accepted answer as part of his code to me for a codereview today. While I certainly admire the elegance of the answer in question, I am not happy with the performance. I have tried this solution (I use set to reduce lookup time)

def ordered_set(in_list):
    out_list = []
    added = set()
    for val in in_list:
        if not val in added:
            out_list.append(val)
            added.add(val)
    return out_list

To compare efficiency, I used a random sample of 100 integers – 62 were unique

from random import randint
x = [randint(0,100) for _ in xrange(100)]

In [131]: len(set(x))
Out[131]: 62

Here are the results of the measurements

In [129]: %timeit list(OrderedDict.fromkeys(x))
10000 loops, best of 3: 86.4 us per loop

In [130]: %timeit ordered_set(x)
100000 loops, best of 3: 15.1 us per loop

Well, what happens if set is removed from the solution?

def ordered_set(inlist):
    out_list = []
    for val in inlist:
        if not val in out_list:
            out_list.append(val)
    return out_list

The result is not as bad as with the OrderedDict, but still more than 3 times of the original solution

In [136]: %timeit ordered_set(x)
10000 loops, best of 3: 52.6 us per loop

There are also solutions using Pandas and Numpy. They both return numpy array so you have to use the function .tolist() if you want a list.

t=['a','a','b','b','b','c','c','c']
t2= ['c','c','b','b','b','a','a','a']

Pandas solution

Using Pandas function unique():

import pandas as pd
pd.unique(t).tolist()
>>>['a','b','c']
pd.unique(t2).tolist()
>>>['c','b','a']

Numpy solution

Using numpy function unique().

import numpy as np
np.unique(t).tolist()
>>>['a','b','c']
np.unique(t2).tolist()
>>>['a','b','c']

Note that numpy.unique() also sort the values. So the list t2 is returned sorted. If you want to have the order preserved use as in this answer:

_, idx = np.unique(t2, return_index=True)
t2[np.sort(idx)].tolist()
>>>['c','b','a']

The solution is not so elegant compared to the others, however, compared to pandas.unique(), numpy.unique() allows you also to check if nested arrays are unique along one selected axis.

Another way of doing:

>>> seq = [1,2,3,'a', 'a', 1,2]
>> dict.fromkeys(seq).keys()
['a', 1, 2, 3]

Simple and easy:

myList = [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8]
cleanlist = []
[cleanlist.append(x) for x in myList if x not in cleanlist]

Output:

>>> cleanlist 
[1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8]

In this answer, will be two sections: Two unique solutions, and a graph of speed for specific solutions.

Removing Duplicate Items

Most of these answers only remove duplicate items which are hashable, but this question doesn’t imply it doesn’t just need hashable items, meaning I’ll offer some solutions which don’t require hashable items.

collections.Counter is a powerful tool in the standard library which could be perfect for this. There’s only one other solution which even has Counter in it. However, that solution is also limited to hashable keys.

To allow unhashable keys in Counter, I made a Container class, which will try to get the object’s default hash function, but if it fails, it will try its identity function. It also defines an eq and a hash method. This should be enough to allow unhashable items in our solution. Unhashable objects will be treated as if they are hashable. However, this hash function uses identity for unhashable objects, meaning two equal objects that are both unhashable won’t work. I suggest you overriding this, and changing it to use the hash of an equivalent mutable type (like using hash(tuple(my_list)) if my_list is a list).

I also made two solutions. Another solution which keeps the order of the items, using a subclass of both OrderedDict and Counter which is named ‘OrderedCounter’. Now, here are the functions:

from collections import OrderedDict, Counter

class Container:
    def __init__(self, obj):
        self.obj = obj
    def __eq__(self, obj):
        return self.obj == obj
    def __hash__(self):
        try:
            return hash(self.obj)
        except:
            return id(self.obj)

class OrderedCounter(Counter, OrderedDict):
     'Counter that remembers the order elements are first encountered'

     def __repr__(self):
         return '%s(%r)' % (self.__class__.__name__, OrderedDict(self))

     def __reduce__(self):
         return self.__class__, (OrderedDict(self),)

def remd(sequence):
    cnt = Counter()
    for x in sequence:
        cnt[Container(x)] += 1
    return [item.obj for item in cnt]

def oremd(sequence):
    cnt = OrderedCounter()
    for x in sequence:
        cnt[Container(x)] += 1
    return [item.obj for item in cnt]

remd is non-ordered sorting, oremd is ordered sorting. You can clearly tell which one is faster, but I’ll explain anyways. The non-ordered sorting is slightly faster. It keeps less data, since it doesn’t need order.

Now, I also wanted to show the speed comparisons of each answer. So, I’ll do that now.

Which Function is the Fastest?

For removing duplicates, I gathered 10 functions from a few answers. I calculated the speed of each function and put it into a graph using matplotlib.pyplot.

I divided this into three rounds of graphing. A hashable is any object which can be hashed, an unhashable is any object which cannot be hashed. An ordered sequence is a sequence which preserves order, an unordered sequence does not preserve order. Now, here are a few more terms:

Unordered Hashable was for any method which removed duplicates, which didn’t necessarily have to keep the order. It didn’t have to work for unhashables, but it could.

Ordered Hashable was for any method which kept the order of the items in the list, but it didn’t have to work for unhashables, but it could.

Ordered Unhashable was any method which kept the order of the items in the list, and worked for unhashables.

On the y-axis is the amount of seconds it took.

On the x-axis is the number the function was applied to.

We generated sequences for unordered hashables and ordered hashables with the following comprehension: [list(range(x)) + list(range(x)) for x in range(0, 1000, 10)]

For ordered unhashables: [[list(range(y)) + list(range(y)) for y in range(x)] for x in range(0, 1000, 10)]

Note there is a ‘step’ in the range because without it, this would’ve taken 10x as long. Also because in my personal opinion, I thought it might’ve looked a little easier to read.

Also note the keys on the legend are what I tried to guess as the most vital parts of the function. As for what function does the worst or best? The graph speaks for itself.

With that settled, here are the graphs.

Unordered Hashables

(Zoomed in)

Ordered Hashables

(Zoomed in)

Ordered Unhashables

(Zoomed in)

I had a dict in my list, so I could not use the above approach. I got the error:

TypeError: unhashable type:

So if you care about order and/or some items are unhashable. Then you might find this useful:

def make_unique(original_list):
    unique_list = []
    [unique_list.append(obj) for obj in original_list if obj not in unique_list]
    return unique_list

Some may consider list comprehension with a side effect to not be a good solution. Here’s an alternative:

def make_unique(original_list):
    unique_list = []
    map(lambda x: unique_list.append(x) if (x not in unique_list) else False, original_list)
    return unique_list