Best way to find unique items in a list

[Thomas Hamelryck]

maxm <maxm at normik.dk> wrote:
: I have written the following snippet to return a list of unique items in
: another list. I just wondered if there was a smarter/faster way of doing it?

You could transform the list into a kjbuckets Set object:

set=kjSet(list)

This will only retain the unique items in the list. If you 
want a list again you can do:

unique_list=set.items()

kjSet is part of the kjbuckets module (written in C), so
you'll have to install it separately (which might be overkill
if you're only interested in a simple solution). However, if
you're going to need this often and for large lists it's 
probably an excellent solution.

Cheers,

---
Thomas Hamelryck    Institute of Molecular and Structural Biology
Aarhus University   Gustav Wieds Vej 10C
DK-8000 Aarhus C    Denmark