Getting first n unique elements from Python list

Question

I have a python list where elements can repeat.

>>> a = [1,2,2,3,3,4,5,6]

I want to get the first n unique elements from

Answer 1

You can adapt the popular itertools unique_everseen recipe:

def unique_everseen_limit(iterable, limit=5):
    seen = set()
    seen_add = seen.add
    for element in iterable:
        if element not in seen:
            seen_add(element)
            yield element
        if len(seen) == limit:
            break

a = [1,2,2,3,3,4,5,6]

res = list(unique_everseen_limit(a))  # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Alternatively, as suggested by @Chris_Rands, you can use itertools.islice to extract a fixed number of values from a non-limited generator:

from itertools import islice

def unique_everseen(iterable):
    seen = set()
    seen_add = seen.add
    for element in iterable:
        if element not in seen:
            seen_add(element)
            yield element

res = list(islice(unique_everseen(a), 5))  # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Note the unique_everseen recipe is available in 3rd party libraries via more_itertools.unique_everseen or toolz.unique, so you could use:

from itertools import islice
from more_itertools import unique_everseen
from toolz import unique

res = list(islice(unique_everseen(a), 5))  # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
res = list(islice(unique(a), 5))           # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]