On Aug 16, 1:37 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve +comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Tue, 16 Aug 2011 04:14 pm ChasBrown wrote: > > > > > On Aug 15, 4:26 pm, Johannes <dajo.m...@web.de> wrote: > >> hi list, > >> what is the best way to check if a given list (lets call it l1) is > >> totally contained in a second list (l2)? > > >> for example: > >> l1 = [1,2], l2 = [1,2,3,4,5] -> l1 is contained in l2 > >> l1 = [1,2,2,], l2 = [1,2,3,4,5] -> l1 is not contained in l2 > >> l1 = [1,2,3], l2 = [1,3,5,7] -> l1 is not contained in l2 > > >> my problem is the second example, which makes it impossible to work with > >> sets insteads of lists. But something like set.issubset for lists would > >> be nice. > > >> greatz Johannes > > > My best guess: > > > from collections import Counter > > There's no reason to think that the Original Poster wants a multiset based > solution. He asked about lists and sublists. That's a standard term, like > substring: > > "12" is a substring of "01234". > "21" and "13" are not. > > [1, 2] is a sublist of [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]. > [2, 1] and [1, 3] are not. > > Since lists are ordered, so are sublists. >
That's reasonable; although except in the subject, the OP never uses the term 'sublist'; instead using more ambiguous terms like 'contains', 'is totally contained', etc., with definition by limited example. So it was a bit of a guess on my part of what was wanted. > If the OP does want a solution that ignores order, then he needs to describe > his problem better. As it turns out, in another response the OP says he wants [2,1,2] to be 'contained' by [1,2,2]. But in any case he always has sorted lists, in which case, interestingly, the multiset approach and your more canonical sublist approach yield the same results. Cheers - Chas -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
