Lists are the same but not considered equal?

Question

novice at Python encountering a problem testing for equality. I have a list of lists, states[]; each state contains x, in this specific case x=3, Boolean values. In my program, I generate a list of Boolean values, the first three of which correspond to a state[i]. I loop through the list of states testing for equality (one of them is certainly correct as all possible boolean permutations are in states, but equality is never detected. No clue why, here is some code I modified to test it:

 temp1 = []
 for boolean in aggregate:
     temp1.append(boolean)
 if len(temp1) == len(propositions):
    break
 print temp1
 print states[0]
 if temp1 == states[0]:
     print 'True'
 else:
     print 'False'

In this case, the length of propisitons is 3. The output I get from this code is:

[True, True, True]
(True, True, True)
False

I'm guessing this has to do with the difference in brackets? Something to do with the fact that states[0] is a list within a list? Cheers.

Answer 1

You are comparing a tuple (True, True, True) against a list [True, True, True]

Of course they're different.

Try casting your list to tuple on-the-go, to compare:

temp1 = []
for boolean in aggregate:
    temp1.append(boolean)
if len(temp1) == len(propositions):
   break
print temp1
print states[0]
if tuple(temp1) == states[0]:
    print 'True'
else:
    print 'False'

Or casting your tuple to list on-the-go, to compare:

temp1 = []
for boolean in aggregate:
    temp1.append(boolean)
if len(temp1) == len(propositions):
   break
print temp1
print states[0]
if temp1 == list(states[0]):
    print 'True'
else:
    print 'False'

Output:

[True, True, True]
(True, True, True)
True