Eliminating duplicates entries from a list efficiently

[phil hunt]

On 3 Jul 2004 00:40:00 GMT, Paul <paul at oz.net> wrote:
>Can anyone suggest an efficient way to eliminate duplicate entries
>in a list?  The naive approach below works fine, but is very slow 
>with lists containing tens of thousands of entries:
>
>def uniq(list):
>    u = []
>    for x in list:
>        if x not in u: u.append(x)
>    return u
>    
>print uniq(['a','b','c','a'])
>['a', 'b', 'c']


How about:

def uniq(list):
   list.sort() # put duplicate entries together
   lastValue = "different from 0th value" + str(list[0])
   u = []
   for item in list:
      if item != lastValue:
         u.append(item)
         lastValue = item
   return u



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