Remove specific words by comparing two lists

Question

I have two lists.

x=['billed_qty','billed_amt','sale_value']

y=['george billed_qty', 'sam billed_amt', 'ricky sale_value', 'donald billed_qty']

I need to eliminate the words in list y that occur in list x and want the resultant list as:

z=['george','sam','ricky','donald']

How can I achieve this?

Thanks

I hate to be *"that guy"* but you might want to look into reducing the complexity of your data structures. — Malekai, Jun 18 '19 at 13:31
@LogicalBranch Nothing wrong with being that guy who gives sage advice instead of rushing to answer the question. — cs95, Jun 18 '19 at 16:56

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 18 '19 at 04:55

7

Use regex with list comprehension:

comp = re.compile('|'.join(x))
z = [re.sub(comp, '', i).strip() for i in y]

print(z)
['george','sam','ricky','donald']

answered Jun 18 '19 at 04:55

Space Impact

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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 18 '19 at 04:54

3

Use str.join with str.split in list comprehension:

z = [' '.join(w for w in s.split() if w not in x) for s in y]
print(z)

Output:

['george', 'sam', 'ricky', 'donald']

answered Jun 18 '19 at 04:54

Chris

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U13-Forward · Answer 3 · 2019-06-19T00:39:58.903

2

Why not:

print([' '.join(set(i.split()).difference(set(x))) for i in y])

Output:

['george', 'sam', 'ricky', 'donald']

edited Jun 19 '19 at 00:39

answered Jun 18 '19 at 04:57

U13-Forward

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 18 '19 at 13:30

I don't know if it covers all your cases, but a simple solution would be this:

for i in x:
  for idx, k in enumerate(y):
    y[idx] = k.replace(" "+i, "")

For every value in array x replace its value in array y with an empty string (including the space on the left).

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 18 '19 at 05:28

At the first, split elements of y:

for i in range(0,len(y)):
    y[i] = y[i].split(' ')

So, y is:

[['george', 'billed_qty'], ['sam', 'billed_amt'], ['ricky', 'sale_value'], ['donald', 'billed_qty']]

Now, check existence of elements of x in y:

for i in range(0,len(y)):
    for j in range(0,len(x)):
        if x[j] in y[i][1]:
            y[i] = y[i][0]

y changes into:

['george', 'sam', 'ricky', 'donald']

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 18 '19 at 06:38

For that you can solve it by using itertools.

Solution is as follow..

import itertools

z = [i.split() for i in y]

# This gives us z = [['george', 'billed_qty'], ['sam', 'billed_amt'], ['ricky', 'sale_value'], ['donald', 'billed_qty']]

w = list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(z))

# This gives us w = ['george', 'billed_qty', 'sam', 'billed_amt', 'ricky', 'sale_value', 'donald', 'billed_qty']

output = [a for a in w if a not in x]

# This gives us output = ['george', 'sam', 'ricky', 'donald']

Remove specific words by comparing two lists

6 Answers6