Question

I have a list of many elements.

I care about two of its elements, a and b.

I don’t know the order of the list, nor do I want to sort it.

Is there a nice one-liner that will return True if a occurs before b and false otherwise?

Answer 1

Edit: Rewritten to check more cases

OK, so this problem needs a bit more work. Mark Byers is completely right in that my first test only covered cases where the result would be True. This is especially relevant because we need exception handlers for the other solutions. So I’ve gone into a bit more detail:

stmts = {
"Mark Byers: ": "x = l.index(a) < l.index(b)",
"jcollado: ": """try:
    x = bool(l.index(b, l.index(a)))
except ValueError:
    x = False""",
"Greg Hewgill: ": """try:
   x = b in l[l.index(a):]
except ValueError:
   x = False"""
}

setups = ["a = 80; b = 90; l = list(range(100))", 
          "a = 5; b = 10; l = list(range(100))", 
          "a = 90; b = 80; l = list(range(100))",
          "a = 10; b = 5; l = list(range(100))"]

import timeit
for se in setups:
    print(se)
    for st in stmts:
        print(st, timeit.timeit(stmt=stmts[st], setup=se))
    print()

results in:

a = 80; b = 90; l = list(range(100))
Mark Byers:  5.760545506106019
Greg Hewgill:  3.454101240451526     # Tie!
jcollado:  3.4574156981854536        # Tie!


a = 5; b = 10; l = list(range(100))
Mark Byers:  1.0853995762934794      # Close runner-up!
Greg Hewgill:  1.7265326426395209
jcollado:  1.0528704983320782        # Winner!

a = 90; b = 80; l = list(range(100))
Mark Byers:  5.741535600372806
Greg Hewgill:  3.623253643486848     # Winner!
jcollado:  4.567104188774817

a = 10; b = 5; l = list(range(100))
Mark Byers:  1.0592141197866987      # Winner!
Greg Hewgill:  4.73399648151641
jcollado:  4.77415749512712

So the efficiency gain from jcollado’s method is mostly eaten up by the cost of the exception handler (expecially if it triggers). All three solutions win (or tie with the winner) half of the time, so which method works best on your actual data is hard to say. Perhaps you might want to go with the one that’s easiest to read.