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

It looks like tuple(a) == tuple(b) is the best overall choice. Or perhaps tuple comparison with a preceding len check if they'll often be different lengths. This does create extra lists, but hopefully not an issue except for really huge lists. Here is my comparison of the various alternatives suggested:

import timeit

tests = (
'''
a=b=[5]*100
''',

'''
a=[5]*100
b=[5]*3
''',

'''
a=b=(5,)*100
''',

'''
a=b="This on is a string" * 5
''',

'''
import array
a=b=array.array('B', "This on is a string" * 5)
'''
)

common = '''import itertools
def comp1(a, b):
    if len(a) != len(b):
        return False
    for i, v in enumerate(a):
        if v != b[i]:
            return False
    return True'''

for i, setup in enumerate(tests):
    t1 = timeit.Timer("comp1(a, b)", setup + common)
    t2 = timeit.Timer("all(x == y for x, y in itertools.izip_longest(a, b))", setup + common)
    t3 = timeit.Timer("all([x == y for x, y in itertools.izip_longest(a, b)])", setup + common)
    t4 = timeit.Timer("list(a) == list(b)", setup + common)
    t5 = timeit.Timer("tuple(a) == tuple(b)", setup + common)

    print '==test %d==' % i
    print '   comp1: %g' % t1.timeit()
    print ' all gen: %g' % t2.timeit()
    print 'all list: %g' % t3.timeit()
    print '    list: %g' % t4.timeit()
    print '   tuple: %g\n' % t5.timeit()

Here are the results:

==test 0==
   comp1: 27.8089
 all gen: 31.1406
all list: 29.4887
    list: 3.58438
   tuple: 3.25859

==test 1==
   comp1: 0.833313
 all gen: 3.8026
all list: 33.5288
    list: 1.90453
   tuple: 1.74985

==test 2==
   comp1: 30.606
 all gen: 31.4755
all list: 29.5637
    list: 3.56635
   tuple: 1.60032

==test 3==
   comp1: 33.3725
 all gen: 35.3699
all list: 34.2619
    list: 10.2443
   tuple: 10.1124

==test 4==
   comp1: 31.7014
 all gen: 32.0051
all list: 31.0664
    list: 8.35031
   tuple: 8.16301

Edit: Added a few more tests. This was run on an AMD 939 3800+ with 2GB of ram. Linux 32bit, Python 2.6.2