Remove item from list based on the next item in same list

Question

I just started learning python and here I have a sorted list of protein sequences (total 59,000 sequences) and some of them overlap. I have made a toy list here for example:

Answer 1

As stated in other answers, your error comes from calculating the length of your input at the start and then not updating it as you shorten the list.

Here's another take at a working solution:

with open('toy.txt', 'r') as infile:
    input_lines = reversed(map(lambda s: s.strip(), infile.readlines()))

output = []
for pattern in input_lines:
    if len(output) == 0 or not output[-1].startswith(pattern):        
        output.append(pattern)

print('\n'.join(reversed(output)))