How to find list intersection?

You can also use numpy.intersect1d(ar1, ar2).
It return the unique and sorted values that are in both of two arrays.

This way you get the intersection of two lists and also get the common duplicates.

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> a = Counter([1,2,3,4,5])
>>> b = Counter([1,3,5,6])
>>> a &= b
>>> list(a.elements())
[1, 3, 5]

This is an example when you need Each element in the result should appear as many times as it shows in both arrays.

def intersection(nums1, nums2):
    #example:
    #nums1 = [1,2,2,1]
    #nums2 = [2,2]
    #output = [2,2]
    #find first 2 and remove from target, continue iterating

    target, iterate = [nums1, nums2] if len(nums2) >= len(nums1) else [nums2, nums1] #iterate will look into target

    if len(target) == 0:
            return []

    i = 0
    store = []
    while i < len(iterate):

         element = iterate[i]

         if element in target:
               store.append(element)
               target.remove(element)

         i += 1


    return store

It might be late but I just thought I should share for the case where you are required to do it manually (show working - haha) OR when you need all elements to appear as many times as possible or when you also need it to be unique.

Kindly note that tests have also been written for it.

    from nose.tools import assert_equal

    '''
    Given two lists, print out the list of overlapping elements
    '''

    def overlap(l_a, l_b):
        '''
        compare the two lists l_a and l_b and return the overlapping
        elements (intersecting) between the two
        '''

        #edge case is when they are the same lists
        if l_a == l_b:
            return [] #no overlapping elements

        output = []

        if len(l_a) == len(l_b):
            for i in range(l_a): #same length so either one applies
                if l_a[i] in l_b:
                    output.append(l_a[i])

            #found all by now
            #return output #if repetition does not matter
            return list(set(output))

        else:
            #find the smallest and largest lists and go with that
            sm = l_a if len(l_a)  len(l_b) else l_b

            for i in range(len(sm)):
                if sm[i] in lg:
                    output.append(sm[i])

            #return output #if repetition does not matter
            return list(set(output))

    ## Test the Above Implementation

    a = [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89]
    b = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]
    exp = [1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13]

    c = [4, 4, 5, 6]
    d = [5, 7, 4, 8 ,6 ] #assuming it is not ordered
    exp2 = [4, 5, 6]

    class TestOverlap(object):

        def test(self, sol):
            t = sol(a, b)
            assert_equal(t, exp)
            print('Comparing the two lists produces')
            print(t)

            t = sol(c, d)
            assert_equal(t, exp2)
            print('Comparing the two lists produces')
            print(t)

            print('All Tests Passed!!')

    t = TestOverlap()
    t.test(overlap)

Most of the solutions here don't take the order of elements in the list into account and treat lists like sets. If on the other hand you want to find one of the longest subsequences contained in both lists, you can try the following code.

def intersect(a, b):
    if a == [] or b == []: 
        return []
    inter_1 = intersect(a[1:], b)
    if a[0] in b:
        idx = b.index(a[0])
        inter_2 = [a[0]] + intersect(a[1:], b[idx+1:])        
        if len(inter_1) <= len(inter_2):
            return inter_2
    return inter_1

For a=[1,2,3] and b=[3,1,4,2] this returns [1,2] rather than [1,2,3]. Note that such a subsequence is not unique as [1], [2], [3] are all solutions for a=[1,2,3] and b=[3,2,1].

In the case you have a list of lists map comes handy:

>>> lists = [[1, 2, 3], [2, 3, 4], [2, 3, 5]]
>>> set(lists.pop()).intersection(*map(set, lists))
{2, 3}

would work for similar iterables:

>>> lists = ['ash', 'nazg']
>>> set(lists.pop()).intersection(*map(set, lists))
{'a'}

pop will blow if the list is empty so you may want to wrap in a function:

def intersect_lists(lists):
    try:
        return set(lists.pop()).intersection(*map(set, lists))
    except IndexError: # pop from empty list
        return set()

You can also use a counter! It doesn't preserve the order, but it'll consider the duplicates:

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> a = [1,2,3,4,5]
>>> b = [1,3,5,6]
>>> d1, d2 = Counter(a), Counter(b)
>>> c = [n for n in d1.keys() & d2.keys() for _ in range(min(d1[n], d2[n]))]
>>> print(c)
[1,3,5]

when we used tuple and we want to intersection

a=([1,2,3,4,5,20], [8,3,9,5,1,4,20])

for i in range(len(a)):

    b=set(a[i-1]).intersection(a[i])
print(b)
{1, 3, 4, 5, 20}