Remove all the elements that occur in one list from another

Question

Let\'s say I have two lists, l1 and l2. I want to perform l1 - l2, which returns all elements of l1 not in l2

Answer 1

use Set Comprehensions {x for x in l2} or set(l2) to get set, then use List Comprehensions to get list

l2set = set(l2)
l3 = [x for x in l1 if x not in l2set]

benchmark test code:

import time

l1 = list(range(1000*10 * 3))
l2 = list(range(1000*10 * 2))

l2set = {x for x in l2}

tic = time.time()
l3 = [x for x in l1 if x not in l2set]
toc = time.time()
diffset = toc-tic
print(diffset)

tic = time.time()
l3 = [x for x in l1 if x not in l2]
toc = time.time()
difflist = toc-tic
print(difflist)

print("speedup %fx"%(difflist/diffset))

benchmark test result:

0.0015058517456054688
3.968189239501953
speedup 2635.179227x