Interleave different length lists, elimating duplicates, and preserve order

Question

I have two lists, let\'s say:

keys1 = [\'A\', \'B\', \'C\', \'D\', \'E\',           \'H\', \'I\']
keys2 = [\'A\', \'B\',           \'E\', \'F\', \'G\', \'H\',            


        

Answer 1

What you need is basically what any merge utility does: It tries to merge two sequences, while keeping the relative order of each sequence. You can use Python's difflib module to diff the two sequences, and merge them:

from difflib import SequenceMatcher

def merge_sequences(seq1,seq2):
    sm=SequenceMatcher(a=seq1,b=seq2)
    res = []
    for (op, start1, end1, start2, end2) in sm.get_opcodes():
        if op == 'equal' or op=='delete':
            #This range appears in both sequences, or only in the first one.
            res += seq1[start1:end1]
        elif op == 'insert':
            #This range appears in only the second sequence.
            res += seq2[start2:end2]
        elif op == 'replace':
            #There are different ranges in each sequence - add both.
            res += seq1[start1:end1]
            res += seq2[start2:end2]
    return res

Example:

>>> keys1 = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E',           'H', 'I']
>>> keys2 = ['A', 'B',           'E', 'F', 'G', 'H',      'J', 'K']
>>> merge_sequences(keys1, keys2)
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K']

Note that the answer you expect is not necessarily the only possible one. For example, if we change the order of sequences here, we get another answer which is just as valid:

>>> merge_sequences(keys2, keys1)
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'J', 'K', 'I']