Difference Between Two Lists with Many Duplicates in Python
- by Paul
I have several lists that contain many of the same items and many duplicate items. I want to check which items in one list are not in the other list. For example, I might have one list like this:
l1 = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'b', 'c']
and one list like this:
l2 = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'b']
Comparing these two lists I would want to return a third list like this:
l3 = ['c']
I am currently using some terrible code that I made a while ago that I'm fairly certain doesn't even work properly shown below.
def list_difference(l1,l2):
for i in range(0, len(l1)):
for j in range(0, len(l2)):
if l1[i] == l1[j]:
l1[i] = 'damn'
l2[j] = 'damn'
l3 = []
for item in l1:
if item!='damn':
l3.append(item)
return l3
How can I better accomplish this task?
