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How to find the intersection and union of two lists in Python

Date: Jan. 3, 2008  |   Modified: Sept. 9, 2008  |   Tags: datastructures, python   |   3 Comments

My friend Bill had previously alerted me to the coolness of Python sets. However I hadn't found opportunity to use them until now. Here are three functions using sets to remove duplicate entries from a list, find the intersection of two lists, and find the union of two lists. Note, sets were introduced in Python 2.4, so Python 2.4 or later is required. Also, the items in the list must be hashable and order of the lists is not preserved.

For more information on Python sets, see the Library Reference.

""" NOTES:
      - requires Python 2.4 or greater
      - elements of the lists must be hashable
      - order of the original lists is not preserved
"""
def unique(a):
    """ return the list with duplicate elements removed """
    return list(set(a))

def intersect(a, b):
    """ return the intersection of two lists """
    return list(set(a) & set(b))

def union(a, b):
    """ return the union of two lists """
    return list(set(a) | set(b))

if __name__ == "__main__": 
    a = [0,1,2,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
    b = [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]
    print unique(a)
    print intersect(a, b)
    print union(a, b)

Results:
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
[8, 9, 5, 6, 7]
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]

3 Comments — feed icon Comments feed for this post


#1 Derek commented on 2010-02-25:

You may also want to check out this: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/642763/python-intersection-of-two-lists]


#2 Eliot commented on 2010-02-25:

Derek: Thanks. My method is simple, but it has its limitations.


#3 panta commented on 2011-04-17:

thanks for the above - very helpful. do you also know a good solution for intersection & union without eliminating the duplicates beforehand? say I have

a = [1,1,2,4,4]

b = [1,4,4,4]

I would like to get

for intersection = [1,4,4]

and for union = [1,1,2,4,4,4].

Right now, I cannot think of anything better than two nested loops.

Thanks.

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