Question

I am trying to get the difference between 2 containers but the containers are in a weird structure so I dont know whats the best way to perform a difference on it. One containers type and structure I cannot alter but the others I can(variable delims).

delims = ['on','with','to','and','in','the','from','or']
words = collections.Counter(s.split()).most_common()
# words results in [("the",2), ("a",9), ("diplomacy", 1)]

#I want to perform a 'difference' operation on words to remove all the delims words
descriptive_words = set(words) - set(delims)

# because of the unqiue structure of words(list of tuples) its hard to perform a difference
# on it. What would be the best way to perform a difference? Maybe...

delims = [('on',0),('with',0),('to',0),('and',0),('in',0),('the',0),('from',0),('or',0)]
words = collections.Counter(s.split()).most_common()
descriptive_words = set(words) - set(delims)

# Or maybe
words = collections.Counter(s.split()).most_common()
n_words = []
for w in words:
   n_words.append(w[0])
delims = ['on','with','to','and','in','the','from','or']
descriptive_words = set(n_words) - set(delims)

Answer 1

How about just modifying words by removing all the delimiters?

words = collections.Counter(s.split())
for delim in delims:
    del words[delim]