How to remove every occurrence of sub-list from list

Question

I have two lists:

big_list = [2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 4]
sub_list = [1, 2]

I want to remove all sub_list occurrences in big_list.

result

Answer 1

Use itertools.zip_longest to create n element tuples (where n is length of sub_list) and then filter the current element and next n-1 elements when one of the element matched the sub_list

>>> from itertools import zip_longest, islice
>>> itr = zip_longest(*(big_list[i:] for i in range(len(sub_list))))
>>> [sl[0] for sl in itr if not (sl == tuple(sub_list) and next(islice(itr, len(sub_list)-2, len(sub_list)-1)))]
[2, 3, 4]

To improve the efficiency, you can calculate tuple(sub_list) and len(sub_list) before hand you start filtering

>>> l = len(sub_list)-1
>>> tup = tuple(sub_list)
>>> [sl[0] for sl in itr if not (sl == tup and next(islice(itr, l-1, l)))]
[2, 3, 4]