Remove all occurrences of an element in a Python List

This tutorial will discuss how to remove all occurrences of an element in a Python list.

To remove all occurrences of an element from a list, we can iterate over all the elements of the list and skip the elements we don’t want to include.

This can be accomplished using list comprehension. We’ve created a separate function that takes the list as its first argument and the target element we want to delete as the second argument.

def removeAllInstances(listObj, targetElement):
    # Using list comprehension to filter out the targetElement
    return [item for item in listObj
            if item != targetElement]

The function uses list comprehension to generate a new list, excluding the specified element.

In this way, we can remove all occurrences of a given element from the list. If we call this function with a list and the value 22 as arguments, it will remove all occurrences of the value 22 from the list.

Let’s see the complete example,

def removeAllInstances(listObj, targetElement):
    # Using list comprehension to filter out the targetElement
    return [item for item in listObj
            if item != targetElement]

# Test the function
sampleList = [45, 67, 22, 45, 22, 89, 71, 22, 51]
print("Original List:", sampleList)

# Remove all occurrences of value
sampleList = removeAllInstances(sampleList, 22)
print("List after removing all instances of 22 : ", sampleList)

Output

Original List: [45, 67, 22, 45, 22, 89, 71, 22, 51]
List after removing all instances of 22 :  [45, 67, 45, 89, 71, 51]

Summary

Today, we learned how to remove all occurrences of an element in a Python list.