Case insensitive list remove call
10th of April 2006
Often when working with lists of strings in python you might want to deal with the strings in a case insensitive manner. Today I had to fix an issue where I couldn't use somelist.remove(somestring) because the somestring variable might be in there but of a different (case)spelling.
Here was the original code:: def ss(s): return s.lower().strip() if ss(name) in names: foo(name + " was already in 'names'") names.remove(name)
The problem there is that you get an ValueError if the name variable is "peter" and the names variable is ["Peter"].
Here is my solution. Let me know what you think:
def ss(s):
return s.lower().strip()
def ss_remove(list_, element):
correct_element = None
element = ss(element)
for item in list_:
if ss(item) == element:
list_.remove(item)
break
L = list('ABC')
L.remove('B')
#L.remove('c') # will fail
ss_remove(L, 'c') # will work
print L # prints ['A']
return s.lower().strip()
def ss_remove(list_, element):
correct_element = None
element = ss(element)
for item in list_:
if ss(item) == element:
list_.remove(item)
break
L = list('ABC')
L.remove('B')
#L.remove('c') # will fail
ss_remove(L, 'c') # will work
print L # prints ['A']
Might there be a better way?
UPDATE Check out Case insensitive list remove call (part II)