Best way to find unique items in a list

Aahz Maruch aahz at netcom.com
Thu Feb 24 07:24:05 EST 2000


In article <20000224.10515678 at sparky.spkydomain>,
David Fisher  <aiki108 at netscape.net> wrote:
>Here's a quickie.
>
>Def Unique(thelist):
>	uniquedict = {}
>	for i in thelist:
>		uniquedict[i] = 0
>	return uniquedict.keys()
>
>Whether it's any faster i don't know.

Yup.  This is, in fact, the canonical Python idiom.  Now, it's not
*guaranteed* to be faster, but it's got close to O(N) time, whereas
invoking sort() is likely to push O(NlogN) time.
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