Find intersection of two nested lists?

Question

I know how to get an intersection of two flat lists:

b1 = [1,2,3,4,5,9,11,15]
b2 = [4,5,6,7,8]
b3 = [val for val in b1 if val in b2]

or

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Answer 1

I don't know if I am late in answering your question. After reading your question I came up with a function intersect() that can work on both list and nested list. I used recursion to define this function, it is very intuitive. Hope it is what you are looking for:

def intersect(a, b):
    result=[]
    for i in b:
        if isinstance(i,list):
            result.append(intersect(a,i))
        else:
            if i in a:
                 result.append(i)
    return result

Example:

>>> c1 = [1, 6, 7, 10, 13, 28, 32, 41, 58, 63]
>>> c2 = [[13, 17, 18, 21, 32], [7, 11, 13, 14, 28], [1, 5, 6, 8, 15, 16]]
>>> print intersect(c1,c2)
[[13, 32], [7, 13, 28], [1, 6]]

>>> b1 = [1,2,3,4,5,9,11,15]
>>> b2 = [4,5,6,7,8]
>>> print intersect(b1,b2)
[4, 5]