Delete all items in the list

[Chris Rebert]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 10:26 PM, odeits <odeits at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 26, 3:05 am, Clarendon <jine... at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi. This must be a simple command but I just can't find it in the
>> Phthon manual. How do I delete all items with a certain condition from
>> a list? For instance:
>>
>> L=['a', 'b', 'c', 'a']
>>
>> I want to delete all 'a's from the list.
>> But if L.remove('a') only deletes the first 'a'.
>>
>> How do you delete all 'a's?
>> I would really appreciate your help.
>>
>> Thanks.
>
> while 'a' in L:
>   L.remove('a')
>
> not the most efficient but it works

"Not the most efficient"; it's terribly inefficient! It's 2*O(M*N) [M
= number of 'a's in L], versus just N. And that's not even accounting
for all the extra element movement done by .remove()

Cheers,
Chris

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