I don't know enough about Python internals, but the suggested solutions all seem to involve scanning bigList. Can this presumably linear operation be avoided by using dict or similar to find all occurrences of smallist items in biglist and then deleting those occurrences?
Bill Williams In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Chaz Ginger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have a system that has a few lists that are very large (thousands or > tens of thousands of entries) and some that are rather small. Many times > I have to produce the difference between a large list and a small one, > without destroying the integrity of either list. I was wondering if > anyone has any recommendations on how to do this and keep performance > high? Is there a better way than > > [ i for i in bigList if i not in smallList ] > > Thanks. > Chaz -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
