How do I find the duplicates in a list and create another list with them?

Question

How can I find the duplicates in a Python list and create another list of the duplicates? The list only contains integers.

Answer 1

How about simply loop through each element in the list by checking the number of occurrences, then adding them to a set which will then print the duplicates. Hope this helps someone out there.

myList  = [2 ,4 , 6, 8, 4, 6, 12];
newList = set()

for i in myList:
    if myList.count(i) >= 2:
        newList.add(i)

print(list(newList))
## [4 , 6]

Answer 2

Very simple and quick way of finding dupes with one iteration in Python is:

testList = ['red', 'blue', 'red', 'green', 'blue', 'blue']

testListDict = {}

for item in testList:
  try:
    testListDict[item] += 1
  except:
    testListDict[item] = 1

print testListDict

Output will be as follows:

>>> print testListDict
{'blue': 3, 'green': 1, 'red': 2}

This and more in my blog http://www.howtoprogramwithpython.com

Answer 3

Some other tests. Of course to do...

set([x for x in l if l.count(x) > 1])

...is too costly. It's about 500 times faster (the more long array gives better results) to use the next final method:

def dups_count_dict(l):
    d = {}

    for item in l:
        if item not in d:
            d[item] = 0

        d[item] += 1

    result_d = {key: val for key, val in d.iteritems() if val > 1}

    return result_d.keys()

Only 2 loops, no very costly l.count() operations.

Here is a code to compare the methods for example. The code is below, here is the output:

dups_count: 13.368s # this is a function which uses l.count()
dups_count_dict: 0.014s # this is a final best function (of the 3 functions)
dups_count_counter: 0.024s # collections.Counter

The testing code:

import numpy as np
from time import time
from collections import Counter

class TimerCounter(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self._time_sum = 0

    def start(self):
        self.time = time()

    def stop(self):
        self._time_sum += time() - self.time

    def get_time_sum(self):
        return self._time_sum


def dups_count(l):
    return set([x for x in l if l.count(x) > 1])


def dups_count_dict(l):
    d = {}

    for item in l:
        if item not in d:
            d[item] = 0

        d[item] += 1

    result_d = {key: val for key, val in d.iteritems() if val > 1}

    return result_d.keys()


def dups_counter(l):
    counter = Counter(l)    

    result_d = {key: val for key, val in counter.iteritems() if val > 1}

    return result_d.keys()



def gen_array():
    np.random.seed(17)
    return list(np.random.randint(0, 5000, 10000))


def assert_equal_results(*results):
    primary_result = results[0]
    other_results = results[1:]

    for other_result in other_results:
        assert set(primary_result) == set(other_result) and len(primary_result) == len(other_result)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    dups_count_time = TimerCounter()
    dups_count_dict_time = TimerCounter()
    dups_count_counter = TimerCounter()

    l = gen_array()

    for i in range(3):
        dups_count_time.start()
        result1 = dups_count(l)
        dups_count_time.stop()

        dups_count_dict_time.start()
        result2 = dups_count_dict(l)
        dups_count_dict_time.stop()

        dups_count_counter.start()
        result3 = dups_counter(l)
        dups_count_counter.stop()

        assert_equal_results(result1, result2, result3)

    print 'dups_count: %.3f' % dups_count_time.get_time_sum()
    print 'dups_count_dict: %.3f' % dups_count_dict_time.get_time_sum()
    print 'dups_count_counter: %.3f' % dups_count_counter.get_time_sum()

Answer 4

this is the way I had to do it because I challenged myself not to use other methods:

def dupList(oldlist):
    if type(oldlist)==type((2,2)):
        oldlist=[x for x in oldlist]
    newList=[]
    newList=newList+oldlist
    oldlist=oldlist
    forbidden=[]
    checkPoint=0
    for i in range(len(oldlist)):
        #print 'start i', i
        if i in forbidden:
            continue
        else:
            for j in range(len(oldlist)):
                #print 'start j', j
                if j in forbidden:
                    continue
                else:
                    #print 'after Else'
                    if i!=j: 
                        #print 'i,j', i,j
                        #print oldlist
                        #print newList
                        if oldlist[j]==oldlist[i]:
                            #print 'oldlist[i],oldlist[j]', oldlist[i],oldlist[j]
                            forbidden.append(j)
                            #print 'forbidden', forbidden
                            del newList[j-checkPoint]
                            #print newList
                            checkPoint=checkPoint+1
    return newList

so your sample works as:

>>>a = [1,2,3,3,3,4,5,6,6,7]
>>>dupList(a)
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

Answer 5

I would do this with pandas, because I use pandas a lot

import pandas as pd
a = [1,2,3,3,3,4,5,6,6,7]
vc = pd.Series(a).value_counts()
vc[vc > 1].index.tolist()

Gives

[3,6]

Probably isn't very efficient, but it sure is less code than a lot of the other answers, so I thought I would contribute

Answer 6

list2 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3]
lset = set()
[(lset.add(item), list2.append(item))
 for item in list2 if item not in lset]
print list(lset)