Compare each element in a list to all others

Question

Is there a way to compare all elements of a list (ie one such as [4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1, 4]) to all others and return, for each element, the number of other elements it is different from (ie, for the list above [6, 7, 7, 7, 6, 7, 7, 7, 6])? I then will need to add the numbers from this list.

Answer 1

li =  [4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1, 4]

from collections import Counter

c = Counter(li)
print c
length = len(li)

print [length - c[el] for el in li]

Creating c before executing [length - c[el] for el in li] is better than doing count(i) for each element i of the list, because that means that count() do the same count several times (each time it encounters a given element, it counts it)

By the way, another way to write it:

map(lambda x: length-c[x] , li)

Answer 2

You can get similar counter with count() method.
And subtract the total number.
Do it in one line with a comprehension list.

>>> l = [4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1, 4]
>>> [ len(l)-l.count(i) for i in l ]
[6, 7, 7, 7, 6, 7, 7, 7, 6]

Answer 3

For Python 2.7:

test = [4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1, 4]
length = len(test)
print [length - test.count(x) for x in test]

Answer 4

You could just use the sum function, along with a generator expression.

>>> l = [4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1, 4]
>>> length = len(l)
>>> print sum(length - l.count(i) for i in l)
60

The good thing about a generator expression is that you don't create an actual list in memory, but functions like sum can still iterate over them and produce the desired result. Note, however, that once you iterate over a generator once, you can't iterate over it again.