Common elements comparison between 2 lists

Question

Use Python's set intersection:

>>> list1 = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
>>> list2 = [3, 5, 7, 9]
>>> list(set(list1).intersection(list2))
[3, 5]

You can also use sets and get the commonalities in one line: subtract the set containing the differences from one of the sets.

A = [1,2,3,4]
B = [2,4,7,8]
commonalities = set(A) - (set(A) - set(B))

The solutions suggested by S.Mark and SilentGhost generally tell you how it should be done in a Pythonic way, but I thought you might also benefit from knowing why your solution doesn't work. The problem is that as soon as you find the first common element in the two lists, you return that single element only. Your solution could be fixed by creating a result list and collecting the common elements in that list:

def common_elements(list1, list2):
    result = []
    for element in list1:
        if element in list2:
            result.append(element)
    return result

An even shorter version using list comprehensions:

def common_elements(list1, list2):
    return [element for element in list1 if element in list2]

However, as I said, this is a very inefficient way of doing this -- Python's built-in set types are way more efficient as they are implemented in C internally.

You can solve this using numpy:

import numpy as np

list1 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
list2 = [3, 5, 7, 9]

common_elements = np.intersect1d(list1, list2)
print(common_elements)

common_elements will be the numpy array: [3 5].

use set intersections, set(list1) & set(list2)

>>> def common_elements(list1, list2):
...     return list(set(list1) & set(list2))
...
>>>
>>> common_elements([1,2,3,4,5,6], [3,5,7,9])
[3, 5]
>>>
>>> common_elements(['this','this','n','that'],['this','not','that','that'])
['this', 'that']
>>>
>>>

Note that result list could be different order with original list.