How can I make my code be a set?

Question

I have a little code that takes a list of objects, and only outputs the items in the list that are unique.

This is my code

def only_once(a):
    return [x for x in a if a.count(x) is 1]

My teacher requires us to use sets for this function though. Can someone show me what I can do?

My code has to take an input such as a=[1,4,6,7,3,2,4,5,7,5,6], and output [1, 3, 2]. Has to retain it's order also.

Answer 1

[I'm assuming that you're also user1744238 and user1744316 -- please pick a username and stick to it, that way it's easier to check to see what variants of a question you've asked and what you've already tried.]

One set-based approach is to use two sets as a counter. You only care about whether you've seen something once or more than once. For example, here's an easy-to-explain approach:

1. Make an empty set for once and more.
2. Loop over every element of your list, and:
   1. If you haven't seen it before, add it to once.
   2. If you've seen it once, remove it from once and add it to more.
3. Now you know what elements you've seen exactly once, in the set once.
4. Loop over the elements of the list, and if you've seen it once, add it to the output list, and remove it from the once set so you don't output the same element twice.

This gives me:

In [49]: f([1,4,6,7,3,2,4,5,7,5,6])
Out[49]: [1, 3, 2]

Answer 2

To clarify, what you want is a set of items that appear once, and only once.

The best option here is to use collections.Counter(), as it means you only count the items once, rather than once per item, greatly increasing performance:

>>> import collections
>>> {key for key, count in collections.Counter(a).items() if count == 1}
{1, 2, 3}

We simply replace the square brackets with curly braces to signify a set comprehension over a list comprehension, to get a set of results.