List of lists

Marc Boeren M.Boeren at guidance.nl
Wed Nov 19 07:18:35 EST 2003


> I was wondering if anyone knows a short way to do the following..
> I have 2 lists of list..eg
> [('a','b','c'),('k','-','l'),('1','2','3')]
> [('a','b','c'),('k','-','x'),('1','4','3')]
> 
> I want to comapre the two lists of lists and count the number of 
> times the sublists match. In the above example its 1

Anytime you need to do something on corresponding items in two lists, you
should think of zip(), as this binds the matching elements together.
Look at:

>>> a = [('a','b','c'),('k','-','l'),('1','2','3')]
>>> b = [('a','b','c'),('k','-','x'),('1','4','3')]
>>> [aa==bb for aa, bb in zip(a,b)]
[True, False, False]
>>> sum([aa==bb for aa, bb in zip(a,b)])
1

the list-comprehension [aa==bb for aa, bb in zip(a,b)] can be used to count
how many items matched, but is also useful to determine exactly which items
matched.

Cheerio, Marc.





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