How do I copy only the values and not the references from a Python list?

Posted by wrongusername on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by wrongusername
Published on 2010-03-16T23:25:19Z Indexed on 2010/03/16 23:31 UTC
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Specifically, I want to create a backup of a list, then make some changes to that list, append all the changes to a third list, but then reset the first list with the backup before making further changes, etc, until I'm finished making changes and want to copy back all the content in the third list to the first one. Unfortunately, it seems that whenever I make changes to the first list in another function, the backup gets changed also. Using original = backup didn't work too well; nor did using

def setEqual(restore, backup):
    restore = []
    for number in backup:
        restore.append(number)

solve my problem; even though I successfully restored the list from the backup, the backup nevertheless changed whenever I changed the original list.

How would I go about solving this problem?

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