Remove Empty Lists from List in Python

To remove empty lists from a list using Python, the easiest way is to use list comprehension.

lst = [1,2,3, [], 0, "a", [], [], "b"]

list_without_empty_list = [x for x in lst if x != []]

print(list_without_empty_list)

#Output:
[1, 2, 3, 0, 'a', 'b']

You can also use the Python filter() function.

lst = [1,2,3, [], 0, "a", [], [], "b"]

list_without_empty_list = list(filter(lambda x: x != [], lst))

print(list_without_empty_list)

#Output:
[1, 2, 3, 0, 'a', 'b']

When working with lists of objects, it can be valuable to be able to easily filter and remove unwanted values from your list.

One such situation where you may want to remove values from a list is if you have a lot of empty lists in your list.

We can easily remove all empty lists from a list using Python with list comprehension. List comprehension offers a shorter syntax when you want to create a new list based on the values of an existing list.

We can use list comprehension to remove all instances of a particular value in a list easily.

Below is the code which will allow you to remove all empty lists from a list using list comprehension in Python.

lst = [1,2,3, [], 0, "a", [], [], "b"]

list_without_empty_list = [x for x in lst if x != []]

print(list_without_empty_list)

#Output:
[1, 2, 3, 0, 'a', 'b']

Removing Empty Lists from List with Python filter() Function

The Python filter() function is a built-in function that allows you to process an iterable and extract items that satisfy a given condition.

We can use the Python filter() function to extract all the items in a list which do not equal ‘[]’ and remove the empty lists from a list.

Below is some example code showing you how to remove empty list from a list using the filter() function.

lst = [1,2,3, [], 0, "a", [], [], "b"]

list_without_empty_list = list(filter(lambda x: x != [], lst))

print(list_without_empty_list)

#Output:
[1, 2, 3, 0, 'a', 'b']

Removing Any Value from List Using Python

In a very similar way, we can remove any value from a list using list comprehension.

For example, if we instead wanted to remove all zeros from a list, we could do that easily with list comprehension in Python by adjusting the code above.

list_of_numbers = [1,0,4,2,-4,0,0,3,0,-1,0]

list_without_zeros = [x for x in list_of_numbers if x != 0]

print(list_without_zeros)

#Output:
[1,4,2,-4,3,-1]

Another example would be if we have a list of strings, and we want to remove empty strings from that list. We can remove empty strings easily from a list with list comprehension in Python.

list_of_strings = [“This”,””,”is”,”a”,”list”,””,”with”,”empty”,””,”strings”,”.”]

list_without_empty_strings = [x for x in list_of_strings if x != “”]

print(list_without_empty_strings)

#Output:
[‘This’, ‘is’, ‘a’, ‘list’, ‘with’, ’empty’, ‘strings’, ‘.’]

Hopefully this article has been useful for you to learn how to remove empty lists from a list in Python.