How to remove every occurrence of sub-list from list

I have two lists:

big_list = [2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 4]
sub_list = [1, 2]

I want to remove all sub_list occurrences in big_list.

result should be [2, 3, 4]

For strings you could use this:

'2123124'.replace('12', '')

But AFAIK this does not work for lists.

This is not a duplicate of Removing a sublist from a list since I want to remove all sub-lists from the big-list. In the other question the result should be [5,6,7,1,2,3,4].

Update: For simplicity I took integers in this example. But list items could be arbitrary objects.

Update2:

if big_list = [1, 2, 1, 2, 1] and sub_list = [1, 2, 1], I want the result to be [2, 1] (like '12121'.replace('121', ''))

Update3:

I don't like copy+pasting source code from StackOverflow into my code. That's why I created second question at software-recommendations: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/51273/library-to-remove-every-occurrence-of-sub-list-from-list-python

Update4: if you know a library to make this one method call, please write it as answer, since this is my preferred solution.

The test should pass this test:

def test_remove_sub_list(self):
    self.assertEqual([1, 2, 3], remove_sub_list([1, 2, 3], []))
    self.assertEqual([1, 2, 3], remove_sub_list([1, 2, 3], [4]))
    self.assertEqual([1, 3], remove_sub_list([1, 2, 3], [2]))
    self.assertEqual([1, 2], remove_sub_list([1, 1, 2, 2], [1, 2]))
    self.assertEquals([2, 1], remove_sub_list([1, 2, 1, 2, 1], [1, 2, 1]))
    self.assertEqual([], remove_sub_list([1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2], [1, 2]))

Solution 1:

You'd have to implement it yourself. Here is the basic idea:

def remove_sublist(lst, sub):
    i = 0
    out = []
    while i < len(lst):
        if lst[i:i+len(sub)] == sub:
            i += len(sub)
        else:
            out.append(lst[i])
            i += 1
    return out

This steps along every element of the original list and adds it to an output list if it isn't a member of the subset. This version is not very efficient, but it works like the string example you provided, in the sense that it creates a new list not containing your subset. It also works for arbitrary element types as long as they support ==. Removing [1,1,1] from [1,1,1,1] will correctly result in [1], as for a string.

Here is an IDEOne link showing off the result of

>>> remove_sublist([1, 'a', int, 3, float, 'a', int, 5], ['a', int])
[1, 3, <class 'float'>, 5]

Solution 2:

Try del and slicing. The worst time complexity is O(N^2).

sub_list=['a', int]
big_list=[1, 'a', int, 3, float, 'a', int, 5]
i=0
while i < len(big_list):
    if big_list[i:i+len(sub_list)]==sub_list:
        del big_list[i:i+len(sub_list)]
    else:
        i+=1

print(big_list)

result:

[1, 3, <class 'float'>, 5]

Solution 3:

A recursive approach:

def remove(lst, sub):
    if not lst:
        return []
    if lst[:len(sub)] == sub:
        return remove(lst[len(sub):], sub)
    return lst[:1] + remove(lst[1:], sub)
print(remove(big_list, sub_list))

This outputs:

[2, 3, 4]

Solution 4:

A improved version to check whether lst[i:i+len(sub)] < len(lst)

def remove_sublist(lst, sub):
    i = 0
    out = []
    sub_len = len(sub)
    lst_len = len(lst)
    while i < lst_len:
        if (i+sub_len) < lst_len:
            if lst[i: i+sub_len] == sub:
                i += sub_len
            else:
                out.append(lst[i])
                i += 1
        else:
            out.append(lst[i])
            i += 1

    return out