I Googled this problem today and found a lot of people creating long-ish functions to find unique values. There is a much simpler solution: turn your list into a set (which removes duplicates) and then back into a list.
newList = list(set(oldList))
Hope this is of help to someone. Apologies if this is already a well-known solution. Perhaps “set” was unavailable in earlier (pre-2.7) versions of Python.
Update: This post generates a fair amount of traffic. Peter Bengtsson has some other options if you care more about speed/ordering/etc rather than simplicity, which was the goal here.
nice solution! However, I find it odd that (a) this was posted on new years eve, and (b) a political science student is using python. Please explain yourself
Thanks for your comment. I was creating a game over winter break in Python, and am now taking a ‘Python for Political Scientists’ class that’s one of the first of its kind (see more recent posts or whyhat.com for details).
Pingback: Automatically Setup New R and LaTeX Projects | You Study Politics, Right?