Moving items from list to list

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:23:14 -0300, Evan Klitzke <evan at yelp.com> escribió:

> On 6/14/07, HMS Surprise <john at datavoiceint.com> wrote:
>>
>> Just wondered if there was some python idiom for moving a few items
>> from one list to another. I often need to delete 2 or 3 items from one
>> list and put them in another. Delete doesn't seem to have a return
>> value. I don't care which items I get so now I just use a couple of
>> pops or a for loop for more than two.
>
> I'm not sure if this is what you're asking, but if the elements in the
> list are contiguous you can just use list slicing/addition, like this:
>
> a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
> b = [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>
> b = a[2:] + b
> a = a[:2]
>
> Now the contents of a and b respectively are a = [1, 2] and b = [3, 4,
> 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10].

When lists become large this is less convenient because it has to build  
three intermediate lists. At least on my box, pop+append is 5 orders of  
magnitude faster (but as shown on another posts, you should test on your  
box to see what happens):

c:\temp>call python -m timeit -s "a=range(1000000);b=range(1000)"  
"b.append(a.po
p())"
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.35 usec per loop

c:\temp>call python -m timeit -s "a=range(1000000);b=range(1000)"  
"b+=a[-1:];a=a
[:-1]"
10 loops, best of 3: 107 msec per loop

c:\temp>call python -m timeit -s "a=range(1000000);b=range(1000)"  
"b.append(a[-1
]);a=a[:-1]"
10 loops, best of 3: 107 msec per loop

c:\temp>call python -m timeit -s "a=range(1000000);b=range(1000)"  
"b.append(a[0]
);a=a[1:]"
10 loops, best of 3: 110 msec per loop

-- 
Gabriel Genellina