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Re: Clever way to manipulate lists

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg94437] Re: [mg94366] Clever way to manipulate lists
  • From: Sseziwa Mukasa <mukasa at jeol.com>
  • Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:59:50 -0500 (EST)
  • References: <200812110845.DAA01163@smc.vnet.net>

On Dec 11, 2008, at 3:45 AM, guerom00 wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm still struggling through lists manipulation. I'll take a concrete
> example to illustrate my point.
> Let's say I have a first list, say coordinates on a regular grid :
>
> list1={{x1,y1},{x2,y2},{x3,y3}...{xN,yN}}
>
> This obviously has a Length of N. Now, let's say I have a second list.
> In this one, there are fewer than N elements, some points are
> missing... Let's say it misses a point at x2 :
>
> list2 ={{x1,z1},{x3,z3},{x4,z4}...{xN,zN}}
>
> Now, since those two lists are not of the same length, I cannot add
> them, substract them or something. But list2 is included in list1 (in
> the sense of set theory). Now, what I want to do is, in this example,
> remove the point {x2,y2} from list1 and then the two list will have
> the same length and I'll be able to manipulate them as I want.
> Right now, I do that with For loops (detect elements which are in
> list1 and not in list2 and delete them, etc...) and that works but it
> is not elegant.
> I'm looking for a concise, elegant way to do that if somebody sees
> what I mean...

Intersection[list1,list2]

But why bother?  If you know list2 is a subset of list1 just work  
with list2.  Also note that Intersection sorts the result.

Regards,

Ssezi


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