Remove substrings inside a list with better than O(n^2) complexity

Question

I have a list with many words (100.000+), and what I\'d like to do is remove all the substrings of every word in the list.

So for simplicity, let\'s imagine that I have

Answer 1

You can sort your data by length, and then use a list comprehension:

words = ['Hello', 'Hell', 'Apple', 'Banana', 'Ban', 'Peter', 'P', 'e']
new_words = sorted(words, key=len, reverse=True)
final_results = [a for i, a in enumerate(new_words) if not any(a in c for c in new_words[:i])]

Output:

['Banana', 'Hello', 'Apple', 'Peter']