Filtering lists

Question

I want to filter repeated elements in my list for instance

foo = ['a','b','c','a','b','d','a','d']

I am only interested with:

['a','b','c','d']

What would be the efficient way to do achieve this ? Cheers

Answer 1

list(set(foo)) if you are using Python 2.5 or greater, but that doesn't maintain order.

Answer 2

Cast foo to a set, if you don't care about element order.