Why is Python list.remove() not working properly?

Question

I have some lists of strings and I’m trying to find the most repeated value for each one of them. For doing so, I recreated a function whose input is the desired list; however, many of those lists contain the following element '\N'. (two backlash and a capital N)

I don’t want to take into account that element when the function search for the most repeated value, so I thought about filtering out said element from the list first and then run the function.

I tried using

NewList=List.remove('\N')

to no avail. In fact, it deletes the whole list as I get nothing in return, using len(NewList) prints an error saying that it has no length. I thought that the element may be at fault, but I tried removing another string from the List and the same thing happened.

What’s going on? is there a better way to filter out that element from the list?
Thank You

Asked By: Juan Pablo Gómez

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Source

Answer 1

Each time you call list.remove, it removes one matching item from the list, and returns None.

>>> my_list = ['foo', '\N', 'bar', '\N', 'ola']
>>> my_list.remove('\N')
>>> my_list
['foo', 'bar', '\N', 'ola']
>>> my_list.remove('\N')
>>> my_list
['foo', 'bar', 'ola']

If you want to create a new list rather than modifying the existing list, consider using a list comprehension:

>>> my_list = ['foo', '\N', 'bar', '\N', 'ola']
>>> new_list = [i for i in my_list if i != '\N']
>>> new_list
['foo', 'bar', 'ola']

Answered By: Samwise

Why is Python list.remove() not working properly?

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