Comparing lists in Python

Question

Say I have list1 = [1,2,3,4] and list2 = [5,6,7,8]. How would I compare the first element, 1, in list1 with the first el

Answer 1

The default comparison operators compare lists in lexicographical order. So you can say things like:

>>> [1, 2, 3, 4] < [5, 6, 7, 8]
True

If instead you want to compute the elementwise comparison, you can use map and cmp (or any other operator:

>>> map(cmp, [1, 2, 3, 4], [5, 6, 7, 8])
[-1, -1, -1, -1]