[Tutor] Finding uniq. in lists

[Remco Gerlich]

On  0, steve <lonetwin@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi all ye good people,
>  Ques: Is there a nice ( read good+clean+efficient ) way to do this:
> I have a list p = ['foo', 'bar', 'foo-bar', 'foo', 'foo-bar' ]
> I want the list to contain only single instances of elements, ie:I want to 
> filter out all the duplicate entries. This is the first thing that came to my 
> mind :
> 	q = [ p[i] for i in range(len(p)) if p[i] not in p[(i+1):] ]
>  Prob. is I do not like it !! :) ...so either give me a better solu. or 
> convince me that the solu. I have is not bad :)

That will be too slow. Use a dictionary, it's the fastest way:

def uniq(q):
   dict = {}
   for s in q:
      dict[s] = 1
   return dict.keys()

-- 
Remco Gerlich