Related posts on here seem to be different enough that I'm not sure how to apply it to my use case.
I have a list containing sublists; each sublist consists of a pair of elements:
sample = [['tree', 'forest'], ['dog', 'cat'], ['man', 'boy'], ['man', 'woman'], ['boy', 'woman']]
In some cases, pairs share common elements (both 'man' and 'woman' occur in two different pairs).
I want to run this list of lists through a function which will merge all overlapping pairs into one:
output = [['tree','forest'],['dog','cat'],['man','boy','woman']]
So far I've tried turning the sublists into sets and adding them together if they overlap, but I never get the desired output, so I think my programming intuition is too weak here.
This is a shortened version of the data I'm using, but ideally I want to handle an indefinite number of pairs with an indefinite number of overlaps.