Python list - Remove consecutive duplicates (3 Ways)

Learn 3 ways of removing consecutive duplicates from a list in Python.

Python list - Remove consecutive duplicates (3 Ways)

In this article, we will discuss 3 different ways of removing consecutive duplicate elements from a python list. This is what we want to achieve.

input - [1, 2, 4, 7, 3, 7, 8, 4, 4, 9]
output - [1, 2, 4, 7, 3, 7, 8, 4, 9]

So we are not removing all duplicated elements. We are only eliminating consecutive duplicate elements.

Let’s check out the 3 different ways.

Method 1 - For loops will never go out of fashion

x = [1,2,4,7,3,7,8,4,4,9]

previous_value = None
new_lst = []

for elem in x:
   if elem != previous_value:
       new_lst.append(elem)
       previous_value = elem

print(new_lst)
>>> [1, 2, 4, 7, 3, 7, 8, 4, 9]

Method 2 - Let’s be more Pythonic! Use Enumerate

Here is a one-liner solution to the problem.

x = [1,2,4,7,3,7,8,4,4,9]

print([v for i, v in enumerate(x) if i == 0 or v != x[i-1]])
>>> [1, 2, 4, 7, 3, 7, 8, 4, 9]

Tell me that wasn’t pretty !!

Method 3 - It’s Python! There must be a library

Here is the 3rd way using the itertools library.

from itertools import groupby

x = [1,2,4,7,3,7,8,4,4,9]
print([i[0] for i in groupby(x)])
>>> [1, 2, 4, 7, 3, 7, 8, 4, 9]

Now the question is, which one of the above methods is the fastest?

Using the time and matplotlib library, I plotted the time taken for each of those methods.

Time recorded for each method

You can see that the 3rd approach (using the itertools library) is the fastest of all the 3 ways discussed in this article.

Hope you enjoyed this article. Let me know if you have a better way of doing this, through the comments.

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