[Tutor] Arbitrary-argument set function

[Spyros Charonis]

Dear Pythoners,


I am trying to extract from a set of about 20 sequences, the characters
which are unique to each sequence. For simplicity, imagine I have only 3
"sequences" (words in this example) such as:


s1='spam'; s2='scam', s3='slam'


I would like the character that is unique to each sequence, i.e. I need my
function to return the list [ 'p', 'c', ',l' ]. This function I am using is
as follows:


def uniq(*args):

    """ FIND UNIQUE ELEMENTS OF AN ARBITRARY NUMBER OF SEQUENCES"""

    unique = []

    for i in args[0]:

        if i not in args[1:]:

           unique.append(i)

    return unique


and is returning the list [ 's', 'p', 'a', 'm' ]. Any help much appreciated,


Best,

Spyros
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