Remove all occurrences of a value from a list?

Question

In Python remove() will remove the first occurrence of value in a list.

How to remove all occurrences of a value from a list?

This is w

Answer 1

We can also do in-place remove all using either del or pop:

import random

def remove_values_from_list(lst, target):
    if type(lst) != list:
        return lst

    i = 0
    while i < len(lst):
        if lst[i] == target:
            lst.pop(i)  # length decreased by 1 already
        else:
            i += 1

    return lst

remove_values_from_list(None, 2)
remove_values_from_list([], 2)
remove_values_from_list([1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3], 2)
lst = remove_values_from_list([random.randrange(0, 10) for x in range(1000000)], 2)
print(len(lst))

Now for the efficiency:

In [21]: %timeit -n1 -r1 x = random.randrange(0,10)
1 loop, best of 1: 43.5 us per loop

In [22]: %timeit -n1 -r1 lst = [random.randrange(0, 10) for x in range(1000000)]
g1 loop, best of 1: 660 ms per loop

In [23]: %timeit -n1 -r1 lst = remove_values_from_list([random.randrange(0, 10) for x in range(1000000)]
    ...: , random.randrange(0,10))
1 loop, best of 1: 11.5 s per loop

In [27]: %timeit -n1 -r1 x = random.randrange(0,10); lst = [a for a in [random.randrange(0, 10) for x in
    ...:  range(1000000)] if x != a]
1 loop, best of 1: 710 ms per loop

As we see that in-place version remove_values_from_list() does not require any extra memory, but it does take so much more time to run:

• 11 seconds for inplace remove values
• 710 milli seconds for list comprehensions, which allocates a new list in memory