Getting first n unique elements from Python list

Question

I have a python list where elements can repeat.

>>> a = [1,2,2,3,3,4,5,6]

I want to get the first n unique elements from

Answer 1

a = [1,2,2,3,3,4,5,6]

from collections import defaultdict
def function(lis,n):
    dic = defaultdict(int)

    sol=set()

    for i in lis:
            try:
                if dic[i]:
                    pass
                else:
                    sol.add(i)
                    dic[i]=1
                    if len(sol)>=n:
                        break
            except KeyError:
                pass

    return list(sol)

print(function(a,3))

output

[1, 2, 3]

Answer 2

Why not use something like this?

>>> a = [1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6]
>>> list(set(a))[:5]
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Answer 3

There are really amazing answers for this question, which are fast, compact and brilliant! The reason I am putting here this code is that I believe there are plenty of cases when you don't care about 1 microsecond time loose nor you want additional libraries in your code for one-time solving a simple task.

a = [1,2,2,3,3,4,5,6]
res = []
for x in a:
    if x not in res:  # yes, not optimal, but doesnt need additional dict
        res.append(x)
        if len(res) == 5:
            break
print(res)

Answer 4

Here is a Pythonic approach using itertools.takewhile():

In [95]: from itertools import takewhile

In [96]: seen = set()

In [97]: set(takewhile(lambda x: seen.add(x) or len(seen) <= 4, a))
Out[97]: {1, 2, 3, 4}

Answer 5

You can adapt the popular itertools unique_everseen recipe:

def unique_everseen_limit(iterable, limit=5):
    seen = set()
    seen_add = seen.add
    for element in iterable:
        if element not in seen:
            seen_add(element)
            yield element
        if len(seen) == limit:
            break

a = [1,2,2,3,3,4,5,6]

res = list(unique_everseen_limit(a))  # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Alternatively, as suggested by @Chris_Rands, you can use itertools.islice to extract a fixed number of values from a non-limited generator:

from itertools import islice

def unique_everseen(iterable):
    seen = set()
    seen_add = seen.add
    for element in iterable:
        if element not in seen:
            seen_add(element)
            yield element

res = list(islice(unique_everseen(a), 5))  # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Note the unique_everseen recipe is available in 3rd party libraries via more_itertools.unique_everseen or toolz.unique, so you could use:

from itertools import islice
from more_itertools import unique_everseen
from toolz import unique

res = list(islice(unique_everseen(a), 5))  # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
res = list(islice(unique(a), 5))           # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Answer 6

Using set with sorted+ key

sorted(set(a), key=list(a).index)[:5]
Out[136]: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]