Offset positive and negative numbers in two lists and get the rest in Python-CodePudding

I have two lists consisting of a series of positive or negative numbers, and two lists may have unequal lengths, like this:

lst1 = [2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 6, 6, 8, 10]
lst2 = [-1, -2, -2, -3, -6, -10, -11]

The result I want to get is:

lst_ofs = [-1, -2, 3, 5, 6, 6, 8, -11]

Positive and negative numbers with equal absolute value in the two lists are offset by quantity, is there any easy way to do this?

CodePudding user response：

This solution counts the number of the positive and negative instances of each number up to the maximum. The output list is extended on each iteration as necessary.

lst1 = [2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 6, 6, 8, 10]
lst2 = [-1, -2, -2, -3, -6, -10, -11]

lst_ofs = []
for i in range(max(max(lst1), -min(lst2))   1):
    n = lst1.count(i) - lst2.count(-i)
    if abs(n) > 0:
        lst_ofs.extend([int(i * n / abs(n))] * abs(n))
print(lst_ofs)

Output:

[-1, -2, 3, 5, 6, 6, 8, -11]

CodePudding user response：

result = lst1   lst2
# keep checking for pairs until none are left
while True:
    for v in result:
        if -v in result:
            # if v and -v are in the list, remove them both
            # and restart the for loop
            result.remove(v)
            result.remove(-v)
            break
    else:
        # if the for loop made it all the way to the end,
        # break the outer loop
        break

This isn't the most efficient solution, because the for loop starts over each time two values are removed. But it should work.