Elegant way to compare sequences

Question

Does python provide an elegant way to check for \"equality\" of sequences of different types? The following work, but they seem rather ugly and verbose for python code:

Answer 1

You can determine the equality of any two iterables (strings, tuples, lists, even custom sequences) without creating and storing duplicate lists by using the following:

all(x == y for x, y in itertools.izip_longest(a, b))

Note that if the two iterables are not the same length, the shorter one will be padded with Nones. In other words, it will consider [1, 2, None] to be equal to (1, 2).

Edit: As Kamil points out in the comments, izip_longest is only available in Python 2.6. However, the docs for the function also provide an alternate implementation which should work all the way back to 2.3.

Edit 2: After testing on a few different machines, it looks like this is only faster than list(a) == list(b) in certain circumstances, which I can't isolate. Most of the time, it takes about seven times as long. However, I also found tuple(a) == tuple(b) to be consistently at least twice as fast as the list version.