set of list of lists in python

Question

I am having a list of lists :

mat = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[1,2,3],[7,8,9],[4,5,6]]

and I want to convert into a set

Answer 1

Lists are mutable, therefore unhashable. Use tuples instead

In [114]: mat = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[1,2,3],[7,8,9],[4,5,6]]

In [115]: mat = [tuple(t) for t in mat]

In [116]: matset = set(mat)

In [117]: matset
Out[117]: {(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6), (7, 8, 9)}

In [118]: [list(t) for t in matset]
Out[118]: [[4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9], [1, 2, 3]]

Answer 2

@thefourtheye's answer clearly depicts the problem you were facing with non-hashable data types and the way to by pass it so that you can create a set and remove duplicates. This should suffice for most of thef problems but, re-reading your question

In above case the required answer will be [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]].

If the order is important, you need to use OrderedDict

>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> map(list, OrderedDict.fromkeys(map(tuple, mat)).keys())
[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9]]

Answer 3

Since the lists are mutable, they cannot be hashed. The best bet is to convert them to a tuple and form a set, like this

>>> mat = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[1,2,3],[7,8,9],[4,5,6]]
>>> set(tuple(row) for row in mat)
set([(4, 5, 6), (7, 8, 9), (1, 2, 3)])

We iterate through the mat, one list at a time, convert that to a tuple (which is immutable, so sets are cool with them) and the generator is sent to the set function.

If you want the result as list of lists, you can extend the same, by converting the result of set function call, to lists, like this

>>> [list(item) for item in set(tuple(row) for row in mat)]
[[4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9], [1, 2, 3]]