Calculating the similarity of two lists

Question

I have two lists:

eg. a = [1,8,3,9,4,9,3,8,1,2,3] and b = [1,8,1,3,9,4,9,3,8,1,2,3]

Both contain ints. There is no meaning behind the ints (eg. 1 is not \'cl

Answer 1

You can use the difflib module

ratio()
Return a measure of the sequences’ similarity as a float in the range [0, 1].

Which gives :

 >>> s1=[1,8,3,9,4,9,3,8,1,2,3]
 >>> s2=[1,8,1,3,9,4,9,3,8,1,2,3]
 >>> sm=difflib.SequenceMatcher(None,s1,s2)
 >>> sm.ratio()
 0.9565217391304348