Type error: unhashable type: 'list' (using sets) [duplicate]

Answer 1

Here's one way to generate a list of all words that appear in either document:

infile1 = open("1.txt", 'r')
infile2 = open("2.txt", 'r')

data1 = infile1.read()
data2 = infile2.read()

#close files
infile1.close()
infile2.close()

# replace all dots with empty string
data1 = data1.replace('.', '')
data2 = data2.replace('.', '')

# split words in data (splitted by whitespace) and save in words
words1 = data1.split()
words2 = data2.split()

#create combined list
combinedList = []

for word in words1:
    if word not in combinedList:
        combinedList.append(word)

for word in words2:
    if word not in combinedList:
        combinedList.append(word)

print(combinedList)

Answer 2

The problem is an error in the argument your passing to set:

set1 = set([words1]) is defining a list of one item - that contains a list of words.

• eg: [["a", "b", "c"]] ...
• when I guess you would want only ["a", "b", "c"].

remove the [] and do set1 = set(words1)