[Tutor] A simple list question...

[Kent Johnson]

Richard Querin wrote:
> I've got a list of strings. There are some duplicates. I want a list
> of only the unique entries in that list. So I do the following:
> 
> mylist = ['project1' , 'project2', 'project3', 'project4', 'project1']
> 
> d = {}
> 
> for item in mylist:
>     d[item] = None
> 
> cleanedlist = d.keys()
> 
> 
> But d.keys() seems to add '\n' to each entry in cleanedlist.

No, it doesn't. You are confused somewhere; my guess is your original 
data has newlines. Using your code above exactly:

In [1]: mylist = ['project1' , 'project2', 'project3', 'project4', 
'project1']

In [2]: d = {}

In [3]: for item in mylist:
    ...:         d[item] = None
    ...:

In [4]: cleanedlist = d.keys()

In [5]: cleanedlist
Out[5]: ['project4', 'project1', 'project3', 'project2']

No newlines here.

> 2. Is there a better way to achieve my objective (ie. a list method
> for generating the cleaned list?)

If you don't care about the order of items in the new list, just convert 
to a set and back (essentially a more concise version of what you did 
with a dict):

In [6]: list(set(mylist))
Out[6]: ['project4', 'project1', 'project3', 'project2']

Kent