Get difference between two lists

Question

I have two lists in Python, like these:

temp1 = ['One', 'Two', 'Three', 'Four']
temp2 = ['One', 'Two']

I need to create a third list with items from the first list which aren't present in the second one. From the example I have to get:

temp3 = ['Three', 'Four']

Are there any fast ways without cycles and checking?

Answer 1

In [5]: list(set(temp1) - set(temp2))
Out[5]: ['Four', 'Three']

Beware that

In [5]: set([1, 2]) - set([2, 3])
Out[5]: set([1]) 

where you might expect/want it to equal set([1, 3]). If you do want set([1, 3]) as your answer, you'll need to use set([1, 2]).symmetric_difference(set([2, 3])).

Answer 2

i'll toss in since none of the present solutions yield a tuple:

temp3 = tuple(set(temp1) - set(temp2))

alternatively:

#edited using @Mark Byers idea. If you accept this one as answer, just accept his instead.
temp3 = tuple(x for x in temp1 if x not in set(temp2))

Like the other non-tuple yielding answers in this direction, it preserves order

Answer 3

temp3 = [item for item in temp1 if item not in temp2]

Answer 4

Let's say we have two lists

list1 = [1, 3, 5, 7, 9]
list2 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

we can see from the above two lists that items 1, 3, 5 exist in list2 and items 7, 9 do not. On the other hand, items 1, 3, 5 exist in list1 and items 2, 4 do not.

What is the best solution to return a new list containing items 7, 9 and 2, 4?

All answers above find the solution, now whats the most optimal?

def difference(list1, list2):
    new_list = []
    for i in list1:
        if i not in list2:
            new_list.append(i)

    for j in list2:
        if j not in list1:
            new_list.append(j)
    return new_list

versus

def sym_diff(list1, list2):
    return list(set(list1).symmetric_difference(set(list2)))

Using timeit we can see the results

t1 = timeit.Timer("difference(list1, list2)", "from __main__ import difference, 
list1, list2")
t2 = timeit.Timer("sym_diff(list1, list2)", "from __main__ import sym_diff, 
list1, list2")

print('Using two for loops', t1.timeit(number=100000), 'Milliseconds')
print('Using two for loops', t2.timeit(number=100000), 'Milliseconds')

returns

[7, 9, 2, 4]
Using two for loops 0.11572412995155901 Milliseconds
Using symmetric_difference 0.11285737506113946 Milliseconds

Process finished with exit code 0

Answer 5

I wanted something that would take two lists and could do what diff in bash does. Since this question pops up first when you search for "python diff two lists" and is not very specific, I will post what I came up with.

Using SequenceMather from difflib you can compare two lists like diff does. None of the other answers will tell you the position where the difference occurs, but this one does. Some answers give the difference in only one direction. Some reorder the elements. Some don't handle duplicates. But this solution gives you a true difference between two lists:

a = 'A quick fox jumps the lazy dog'.split()
b = 'A quick brown mouse jumps over the dog'.split()

from difflib import SequenceMatcher

for tag, i, j, k, l in SequenceMatcher(None, a, b).get_opcodes():
  if tag == 'equal': print('both have', a[i:j])
  if tag in ('delete', 'replace'): print('  1st has', a[i:j])
  if tag in ('insert', 'replace'): print('  2nd has', b[k:l])

This outputs:

both have ['A', 'quick']
  1st has ['fox']
  2nd has ['brown', 'mouse']
both have ['jumps']
  2nd has ['over']
both have ['the']
  1st has ['lazy']
both have ['dog']

Of course, if your application makes the same assumptions the other answers make, you will benefit from them the most. But if you are looking for a true diff functionality, then this is the only way to go.

For example, none of the other answers could handle:

a = [1,2,3,4,5]
b = [5,4,3,2,1]

But this one does:

  2nd has [5, 4, 3, 2]
both have [1]
  1st has [2, 3, 4, 5]

Answer 6

Here are a few simple, order-preserving ways of diffing two lists of strings.

Code

An unusual approach using pathlib:

import pathlib


temp1 = ["One", "Two", "Three", "Four"]
temp2 = ["One", "Two"]

p = pathlib.Path(*temp1)
r = p.relative_to(*temp2)
list(r.parts)
# ['Three', 'Four']

This assumes both lists contain strings with equivalent beginnings. See the docs for more details. Note, it is not particularly fast compared to set operations.

---

A straight-forward implementation using itertools.zip_longest:

import itertools as it


[x for x, y in it.zip_longest(temp1, temp2) if x != y]
# ['Three', 'Four']