How to Find the Common Items in Two Lists in Python
In Python, there is no method or function to find the common items in two lists. This blog post will show you different ways of doing it.
Create two lists a and b
For our example, we will create lists a and b having a few common items and a few different items.
a = ['apple', 'orange', 'mango', 'strawberry', 'papaya', 'banana']
b = ['durian', 'apple', 'orange', 'mango', 'papaya', 'banana']
Find the common items using set() and &
There are no list functions to find the common items, but there is a set operator & that can be used to find the common items, so you can convert the lists to sets and perform the & operator between the sets. The operator & is also the intersection operation.
We will create list c which contains the intersection of set(a) and set(b)
Intersection of a and b
c = list(set(a) & set(b))
print(c)
Output:
['apple', 'papaya', 'mango', 'orange', 'banana']
Full Python code
a = ['apple', 'orange', 'mango', 'strawberry', 'papaya', 'banana']
b = ['durian', 'apple', 'orange', 'mango', 'papaya', 'banana']
c = list(set(a) & set(b))
print(c)
Output:
['apple', 'papaya', 'mango', 'orange', 'banana']
Why is the resulting list c not ordered?
The set() function does not retain the order. Every time you create a set from a list, or from anything, the items in the set can appear anywhere randomly.
Conclusion
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