How to remove items from a list while iterating?

Question

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I'm iterating over a list of tuples in Python, and am attempting to remove them if they meet certain criteria.

for tup in somelist:
    if determine(tup):
         code_to_remove_tup

What should I use in place of code_to_remove_tup? I can't figure out how to remove the item in this fashion.

Answer 1

For those that like functional programming:

somelist[:] = filter(lambda tup: not determine(tup), somelist)

or

from itertools import ifilterfalse
somelist[:] = list(ifilterfalse(determine, somelist))

Answer 2

You can try for-looping in reverse so for some_list you'll do something like:

list_len = len(some_list)
for i in range(list_len):
    reverse_i = list_len - 1 - i
    cur = some_list[reverse_i]

    # some logic with cur element

    if some_condition:
        some_list.pop(reverse_i)

This way the index is aligned and doesn't suffer from the list updates (regardless whether you pop cur element or not).

Answer 3

The other answers are correct that it is usually a bad idea to delete from a list that you're iterating. Reverse iterating avoids the pitfalls, but it is much more difficult to follow code that does that, so usually you're better off using a list comprehension or filter.

There is, however, one case where it is safe to remove elements from a sequence that you are iterating: if you're only removing one item while you're iterating. This can be ensured using a return or a break. For example:

for i, item in enumerate(lst):
    if item % 4 == 0:
        foo(item)
        del lst[i]
        break

This is often easier to understand than a list comprehension when you're doing some operations with side effects on the first item in a list that meets some condition and then removing that item from the list immediately after.

Answer 4

I needed to do something similar and in my case the problem was memory - I needed to merge multiple dataset objects within a list, after doing some stuff with them, as a new object, and needed to get rid of each entry I was merging to avoid duplicating all of them and blowing up memory. In my case having the objects in a dictionary instead of a list worked fine:

```

k = range(5)
v = ['a','b','c','d','e']
d = {key:val for key,val in zip(k, v)}

print d
for i in range(5):
    print d[i]
    d.pop(i)
print d

```

Answer 5

The answers suggesting list comprehensions are ALMOST correct -- except that they build a completely new list and then give it the same name the old list as, they do NOT modify the old list in place. That's different from what you'd be doing by selective removal, as in @Lennart's suggestion -- it's faster, but if your list is accessed via multiple references the fact that you're just reseating one of the references and NOT altering the list object itself can lead to subtle, disastrous bugs.

Fortunately, it's extremely easy to get both the speed of list comprehensions AND the required semantics of in-place alteration -- just code:

somelist[:] = [tup for tup in somelist if determine(tup)]

Note the subtle difference with other answers: this one is NOT assigning to a barename - it's assigning to a list slice that just happens to be the entire list, thereby replacing the list contents within the same Python list object, rather than just reseating one reference (from previous list object to new list object) like the other answers.

Answer 6

If you want to do anything else during the iteration, it may be nice to get both the index (which guarantees you being able to reference it, for example if you have a list of dicts) and the actual list item contents.

inlist = [{'field1':10, 'field2':20}, {'field1':30, 'field2':15}]    
for idx, i in enumerate(inlist):
    do some stuff with i['field1']
    if somecondition:
        xlist.append(idx)
for i in reversed(xlist): del inlist[i]

enumerate gives you access to the item and the index at once. reversed is so that the indices that you're going to later delete don't change on you.