Pythonic way to merge two overlapping lists, preserving order

Question

Alright, so I have two lists, as such:

• They can and will have overlapping items, for example, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [4, 5, 6, 7].
• The

Answer 1

There are a couple of easy optimizations that are possible.

1. You don't need to start at master[1], since the longest overlap starts at master[-len(addition)]

2. If you add a call to list.index you can avoid creating sub-lists and comparing lists for each index:

This approach keeps the code pretty understandable too (and easier to optimize by using cython or pypy):

master = [1,3,9,8,3,4,5]
addition = [3,4,5,7,8]

def merge(master, addition):
    first = addition[0]
    n = max(len(master) - len(addition), 1)  # (1)
    while 1:
        try:
            n = master.index(first, n)       # (2)
        except ValueError:
            return master + addition

        if master[-n:] == addition[:n]:
            return master + addition[n:]
        n += 1

Answer 2

Based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/30056066/541208:

def join_two_lists(a, b):
  index = 0
  for i in xrange(len(b), 0, -1):
    #if everything from start to ith of b is the 
    #same from the end of a at ith append the result
    if b[:i] == a[-i:]:
        index = i
        break

  return a + b[index:]