looping through a list of lists.

[SBrunning at trisystems.co.uk]

	> On Wednesday, October 8, 2003, at 11:04 AM, saoirse_79 wrote:

	> I have a list of lists as follows:
	> [['-', '-', '-', '-', '-', '-', '-', 'K', 'S', 'A', 'K'],
	> ['-', '-', '-', '-', 'L', 'Q', 'Q', 'T', 'N', 'S', 'E'],
	> ['T', 'L', 'E', 'E', 'L', 'M', 'K', 'L', 'S', 'P', 'E']]
	> I want to be able to read each character  and compare it with all
	> characters at the same positon in all sublists. Is this possible.
	> I have tried a few different methods but nothing seems to allow me
to
	> compare the sublists character by character.

> From:	Rob Hunter [SMTP:rob at cs.brown.edu]
> 
> The responder to this post has a cool way of doing it, but it won't 
> work (I believe) if you have an arbitrary number of sublists.  Can you 
> clarify the problem?  Do you have an arbitrary number of sublists?  Or 
> is it always 3?
 
It *can* work for arbitrary numbers of sublists, depending upon what one
means by 'comparing'. For example:

>>> spam = [['-', '-', '-', '-', '-', '-', '-', 'K', 'S', 'A', 'K'], ['-',
'-', '-', '-', 'L', 'Q', 'Q', 'T', 'N', 'S', 'E'], ['T', 'L', 'E', 'E', 'L',
'M', 'K', 'L', 'S', 'P', 'E']]
>>> for sublist in zip(*spam):
... 	print sublist, max(sublist), min(sublist)
... 
('-', '-', 'T') T -
('-', '-', 'L') L -
('-', '-', 'E') E -
('-', '-', 'E') E -
('-', 'L', 'L') L -
('-', 'Q', 'M') Q -
('-', 'Q', 'K') Q -
('K', 'T', 'L') T K
('S', 'N', 'S') S N
('A', 'S', 'P') S A
('K', 'E', 'E') K E
>>> spam.append(['1', '@', '_', 'Z', 'A', 'z', 'a', 'T', 'L', '5', '!'])
>>> for sublist in zip(*spam):
... 	print sublist, max(sublist), min(sublist)
... 
('-', '-', 'T', '1') T -
('-', '-', 'L', '@') L -
('-', '-', 'E', '_') _ -
('-', '-', 'E', 'Z') Z -
('-', 'L', 'L', 'A') L -
('-', 'Q', 'M', 'z') z -
('-', 'Q', 'K', 'a') a -
('K', 'T', 'L', 'T') T K
('S', 'N', 'S', 'L') S L
('A', 'S', 'P', '5') S 5
('K', 'E', 'E', '!') K !

Cheers,
Simon Brunning,
http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/
--LongSig




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