Question

How to remove duplicate items from a list using list comprehension? I have following code:

a = [1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 9, 6, 2, 8, 5, 2, 3, 5, 7, 3, 5, 8]
b = []
b = [item for item in a if item not in b]

but it doesn’t work, just produces identical list. Why its producing an identical list?

Answer 1

It’s producing an identical list as b contains no elements at run-time.
What you’d want it this:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 9, 6, 2, 8, 5, 2, 3, 5, 7, 3, 5, 8]
>>> b = []
>>> [b.append(item) for item in a if item not in b]
[None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None]
>>> b
[1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 6, 8, 7]