Comparing sequences with range objects

[Antoon Pardon]

I am working with a list of data from which I have to weed out duplicates.
At the moment I keep for each entry a container with the other entries
that are still possible duplicates.

The problem is sometimes that is all the rest. I thought to use a range
object for these cases. Unfortunatly I sometimes want to sort things
and a range object is not comparable with a list or a tuple.

So I have a list of items where each item is itself a list or range object.
I of course could sort this by using list as a key function but that
would defeat the purpose of using range objects for these cases.

So what would be a relatively easy way to get the same result without wasting
too much memory on entries that haven't any weeding done on them.

-- 
Antoon Pardon.