Question

In some of my code I put a series of objects in a list and I build an additional list out of their attributes, which is a string. I need to determine if all the items in this second list have the exact same value, without knowing beforehand which value it is, and return a bool so that I can do different things in my code depending on the result.

I can’t know the names of the properties beforehand, that is why I’m trying to make something as generic as possible.

To make the example clear, an ideal function, called “all_same” would work like this:

>>> property_list = ["one", "one", "one"]
>>> all_same(property_list)
True
>>> property_list = ["one", "one", "two"]
>>> all_same(property_list)
False

I was thinking of making a list of unique elements and then check if its length is 1, but I’m not sure if it’s the most elegant solution out there.

Answer 1

def all_same(items):
    return all(x == items[0] for x in items)

Example:

>>> def all_same(items):
...     return all(x == items[0] for x in items)
...
>>> property_list = ["one", "one", "one"]
>>> all_same(property_list)
True
>>> property_list = ["one", "one", "two"]
>>> all_same(property_list)
False
>>> all_same([])
True