Find intersection of two nested lists?

Question

I know how to get an intersection of two flat lists:

b1 = [1,2,3,4,5,9,11,15]
b2 = [4,5,6,7,8]
b3 = [val for val in b1 if val in b2]

or

<

Answer 1

The functional approach:

input_list = [[1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [2, 3, 4, 5, 6], [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]]

result = reduce(set.intersection, map(set, input_list))

and it can be applied to the more general case of 1+ lists

Answer 2

I don't know if I am late in answering your question. After reading your question I came up with a function intersect() that can work on both list and nested list. I used recursion to define this function, it is very intuitive. Hope it is what you are looking for:

def intersect(a, b):
    result=[]
    for i in b:
        if isinstance(i,list):
            result.append(intersect(a,i))
        else:
            if i in a:
                 result.append(i)
    return result

Example:

>>> c1 = [1, 6, 7, 10, 13, 28, 32, 41, 58, 63]
>>> c2 = [[13, 17, 18, 21, 32], [7, 11, 13, 14, 28], [1, 5, 6, 8, 15, 16]]
>>> print intersect(c1,c2)
[[13, 32], [7, 13, 28], [1, 6]]

>>> b1 = [1,2,3,4,5,9,11,15]
>>> b2 = [4,5,6,7,8]
>>> print intersect(b1,b2)
[4, 5]

Answer 3

Do you consider [1,2] to intersect with [1, [2]]? That is, is it only the numbers you care about, or the list structure as well?

If only the numbers, investigate how to "flatten" the lists, then use the set() method.

Answer 4

You don't need to define intersection. It's already a first-class part of set.

>>> b1 = [1,2,3,4,5,9,11,15]
>>> b2 = [4,5,6,7,8]
>>> set(b1).intersection(b2)
set([4, 5])

Answer 5

You should flatten using this code ( taken from http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~meine/python_tricks ), the code is untested, but I'm pretty sure it works:

def flatten(x):
    """flatten(sequence) -> list

    Returns a single, flat list which contains all elements retrieved
    from the sequence and all recursively contained sub-sequences
    (iterables).

    Examples:
    >>> [1, 2, [3,4], (5,6)]
    [1, 2, [3, 4], (5, 6)]
    >>> flatten([[[1,2,3], (42,None)], [4,5], [6], 7, MyVector(8,9,10)])
    [1, 2, 3, 42, None, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]"""

    result = []
    for el in x:
        #if isinstance(el, (list, tuple)):
        if hasattr(el, "__iter__") and not isinstance(el, basestring):
            result.extend(flatten(el))
        else:
            result.append(el)
    return result

After you had flattened the list, you perform the intersection in the usual way:

c1 = [1, 6, 7, 10, 13, 28, 32, 41, 58, 63]
c2 = [[13, 17, 18, 21, 32], [7, 11, 13, 14, 28], [1, 5, 6, 8, 15, 16]]

def intersect(a, b):
     return list(set(a) & set(b))

print intersect(flatten(c1), flatten(c2))

Answer 6

I was also looking for a way to do it, and eventually it ended up like this:

def compareLists(a,b):
    removed = [x for x in a if x not in b]
    added = [x for x in b if x not in a]
    overlap = [x for x in a if x in b]
    return [removed,added,overlap]