Elegant way to compare sequences

Question

Does python provide an elegant way to check for \"equality\" of sequences of different types? The following work, but they seem rather ugly and verbose for python code:

Answer 1

Since you put the word "equality" in quotes, I assume that you would like to know how the lists are the same and how the are different. Check out difflib which has a SequenceMatcher class:

    sm = difflib.SequenceMatcher(None, a, b)
    for opcode in sm.get_opcodes():
        print "    (%s %d:%d %d:%d)" % opcode

You will get back a sequences of descriptions of the differences. It's fairly simple to turn that into diff-like output.