The Most Pythonic Way to Compare Two Lists in Python

Problem: Given are two lists l1 and l2. You want to perform either of the following: 1. Boolean Comparison: Compare the lists element-wise and return True if your comparison metric returns True for all pairs of elements, and otherwise False. 2. Difference: Find the difference of elements in the first list but not in the … Read more

List Difference | The Most Pythonic Way

Short answer: The most Pythonic way to compute the difference between two lists l1 and l2 is the list comprehension statement [x for x in l1 if x not in set(l2)]. This works even if you have duplicate list entries, it maintains the original list ordering, and it’s efficient due to the constant runtime complexity … Read more

Python Freelancing | How to Exploit This Disruptive Mega Trend (as a Coder)

Short summary of the main points in the video: Freelancing is a mega-trend that will disrupt the organization of the world’s labor in the next 10-20 years. Freelancing platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr grow at 20% per year. You can participate in this trend by focusing on one tiny niche—and become world-class at it. … Read more

The Most Pythonic Way to Check if Two Unordered Lists Are Identical

To check if two unordered lists x and y are identical, compare the converted sets with set(x) == set(y). However, this loses all information about duplicated elements. To consider duplicates, compare the sorted lists with sorted(x) == sorted(y). Due to the efficient merge-sort-like implementation of the sorted() function, this is quite fast for almost-sorted lists. … Read more

Convert Tuple to List | The Most Pythonic Way

Answer: The simplest, most straightforward, and most readable way to convert a tuple to a list is Python’s built-in list(tuple) function. You can pass any iterable (such as a tuple, another list, or a set) as an argument into this so-called constructor function and it returns a new list data structure that contains all elements … Read more

Python Functions and Tricks Cheat Sheet

Python cheat sheets are the 80/20 principle applied to coding: learn 80% of the language features in 20% of the time.Download and pin this cheat sheet to your wall until you feel confident using all these tricks. Download PDF for Printing Try It Yourself: Exercise: Modify each function and play with the output! Here’s the … Read more

The Most Pythonic Way to Check If a List Contains an Element

The standard way of checking if an element exists in a list is to use the in keyword. For example, ‘Alice’ in [1, ‘Alice’, 3] will return True while the same returns False for ‘Bob’. If you need to check more complicated conditions, use the any(condition(x) for x in list) function with a generator expression. … Read more

Convert List to Tuple | The Most Pythonic Way

Answer: The simplest, most straightforward, and most readable way to convert a list to a tuple is Python’s built-in tuple(list) function. You can pass any iterable (such as a list, another tuple, or a set) as an argument into this so-called constructor function and it returns a new tuple data structure that contains all elements … Read more

string.join(list) vs list.join(string) | Why Python’s Creators Chose The Former

If you’re like me, you may have asked yourself the following question: Why is it string.join(list) instead of list.join(string) in Python? ? The join method works with any iterable, not just with lists. Therefore, you’d have to implement it in hundreds of classes instead of just one (in the string class). Additionally, join() works only … Read more