I’ve recently been using list comprehensions more often than not, having never paid them much attention. A decent overview is available here. Perhaps they are a sprinkling of syntactic sugar but I think I’m a fan.

Here are a few more (increasingly nuanced) examples you might find helpful. The only import we need is os:

Make a couple of lists:

list_0=[1,2,3,4,5]

Iterate through each element of list:

[i for i in list_0]

Make a couple of lists with a path:

list_1=['W:/some_path/file1.txt','W:/some_path/file2.txt', 'W:/some_path/file3.txt']
list_2=['W:/some_other_path/file1.txt', 'W:/some_path/file2.txt']

Get file name for each element in list:

[os.path.basename(i) for i in list_1]
[os.path.basename(i) for i in list_2]

Get directory name for each element in list:

[os.path.dirname(i) for i in list_1]
[os.path.dirname(i) for i in list_2]

Get elements in list_1 not in list_2:

[x for x in list_1 if x not in list_2]

Get elements in list_2 not in list_1:

[x for x in list_2 if x not in list_1]

Get unique file regardess of path and keep only unique files WITH their original path (thanks to this answer):

[r for r in list_1 if not any(os.path.basename(z) in r for z in list_2)] 

Create list of file names using a pre-formatted output file name:

output_areas=('A','B','C','d','e')
["%s_summary.csv" %(i) for i in output_areas] 
["%s_summary.csv" %(i.upper()) for i in output_areas] # all upper case
["%s_summary.csv" %(i.lower()) for i in output_areas] # all lower case