Best way to edit nested list for specific problem?

Question

I have a question and different ideas on how to approach it, but I'd like to know what more experienced programmers would do.

Background: I have a nested list, with sub lists, that always have two items, that looks like this: [[category, item];[category, item];...]. categories and items are strings. There are items that end with a number or float and there are others, that end with just characters or spaces. Some (but not all) items are duplicates.

Problem: Just focused on the items, categories do not need to be altered. Do not suggest to use dict or something else, it needs to be a nested list like above.

1. I need to delete every duplicate, that does not end with a number/float - so just one of the 1-10 duplicates remains in the list.
2. If there are duplicates (same items), that end with numbers, I need to sum up all numbers/floats and just leave one entry with the summed up number and delete the original ones.

Example:

Input:

[["fruits", "Apple 1"];["fruits", "Apple 2"];["fruits", "Apple 5"];["cooled", "iced tea 1,5"]; ["cooled", "iced tea 2"]; ["fruits"; "onions"]; ["fruits"; "onions"];["fruits"; "onions"];["frozen"; "Pizza"]

Output:

[["fruits", "Apple 8"];["cooled", "iced tea 3,5"];["fruits"; "onions"];["frozen"; "Pizza"]

Any ideas?

Answer 1

this worked for me

from collections import Counter

vals = [["fruits", "Apple 1"],["fruits", "Apple 2"],["fruits", "Apple 5"],["cooled", "iced tea 1,5"], ["cooled", "iced tea 2"], ["fruits", "onions"], ["fruits", "onions"],["fruits", "onions"],["frozen", "Pizza"]]

counters = {}
others = {}
for sub_list in vals:
    items = sub_list[1].rsplit(' ', 1)
    try:
        num = float(items[-1].replace(',', '.'))
        if sub_list[0] not in counters.keys():
            counter = Counter({items[0]: num})
            counters[sub_list[0]] = counter
        else:
            counters[sub_list[0]].update({items[0]: num})
    except:
       
        others[sub_list[0]] = sub_list[1]

my_result = []
for key, counter in counters.items():
    items = [[key, f"{sub_key} {value}"] for sub_key, value in counter.items()]
    my_result = my_result + items
my_result = my_result + [[key, value] for key, value in others.items()]
print(my_result)        

output

[['fruits', 'Apple 8.0'], ['cooled', 'iced tea 3.5'], ['fruits', 'onions'], ['frozen', 'Pizza']]