Lists and Strings

Episode 3 - Lists and Strings

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Lists and strings are two of the most important types in Python. For these, one variable name stands for several items, so we call them compound types.

Lists

Lists are much like lists in everyday life; they are an ordered sequence where each item can be identified by a number.

Groceries

1. Coffee
2. Sugar
3. Bread
4. Mustard
5. Lettuce In Python the name of the variable could be groceries, and its content would be the items represented as strings:

groceries=["coffee","sugar","bread","mustard","lettuce"]

To refer to any of the items in our list we write brackets around their number:

groceries[1]

One important difference is that in Python we number our items from zero, not one. So groceries[1] is “sugar”.

Each item is called an element and its number is called an index. Any element of a list may be of any legal type.

breakfast=[3,"spam",2,"eggs",4,"sausage "]

List elements can also be lists.

L2D=[[1,2],[3,4],[5,6],[7,8]]

L2D[1] is [3,4] LD2[1][1] is 4

We can index lists with variables, but the type of those variables must be integer.

In [1]: a=1.
In [2]: groceries[a]
TypeError: list indices must be integers, not float
In [3]: i=1
In [4]: groceries[i]

We can also extract elements with a slice. The colon is called the range operator.

numbers=[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
numbers[0] is 1
numbers[:3] is another list [1,2,3]
numbers[8:] is [9,10]
numbers[2:5] is [3,4,5]

It is very important to notice that when the upper bound is specified, it is not included. This is generally true for Python ranges.

We can use negative indices as shorthand for len(list)-index:

numbers[-1] is 10
numbers[-2] is 9

In a range, the negative index is like any other second bound and is not included.

numbers[3:-1] is [4,5,6,7,8,9]

We can provide the range with an increment

numbers[1:6:2] is [2,4,6]

If the increment is present, the first bound must be present even if it is zero.

numbers[0:9:2] is [1,3,5,7,9]

The increment can even be negative:

numbers[9:5:-1] is [10,9,8,7]

Notice the second bound is not included.

A handy way to reverse a list is

rnumbers=numbers[::-1]

We can add an element to the end of a list with append. We prefix it with the name of the list variable, then we put the item to be appended into parentheses.

numbers.append(11)

We can extend a list with another list

numbers.extend([12,13,14])

We can find the length of the list

len(numbers)

We can insert an element before a specified index with insert(index,element)

numbers.insert(0,-1)

Deleting is del

del numbers[12]

We can join (concatenate) two lists with +

L2=L0+L1

We can create a list by starting from an empty list

new_list=[]

We’ll then have to append to it.

If we know how many elements we want, we can also use replication to set up the list.

data=[0.]*num_obs

This creates a list of length num_obs, whose value must be known by the time this statement is invoked; all elements of the list are zero and of type floating point.

A useful operator on lists that we did not cover in the videos is the in operator. It tests whether some quantity is an element of the list. We use this mostly with the conditionals we will study in the next episode.

In [1]: print(2 in numbers)
Out [1]: True

There are other list operations, but these are the most commonly used. Any book or reference on Python can give you a complete enumeration.

One important characteristic of lists is that we can change them in place. That is, we can replace an element by something different.

numbers[4]=22

In Python, a type we can change in place is said to be mutable. The main primitive types (numerical types and characters) are immutable. We can overwrite them but we do not replace them. When we type

x+=11

we are actually deleting the old x entirely and creating a new x.

Strings

The next type we will study is a string. A string is an ordered sequence of characters.

"This is a string."

We can assign strings to a variable just like any other type, but unlike lists we cannot change any of the characters in that variable. Strings are immutable.

message="Please test your input values."
message[17:22]="output" #this is illegal

Like lists, strings can be indexed and they count from zero. We can extract slices just like we can for lists; we just can’t change them within the original string.

in_out=message[17:22]
letter=message[0]

We can go backwards in a string:

message[7::-2]

As we saw with lists, we can reverse a string with

message[::-1]

Strings can also be concatenated using the + sign

out_message=message[:17]+"output"+message[22:]

You see here that we can extract parts of a string, we can rearrange it, and we can add new strings, but we cannot assign those back to the same string variable; we must use a new variable.

There are a few special characters represented with a backslash \ followed by a letter. The most important of these is \n, which represents a newline. Each line in a file is terminated by one or more special characters. Different operating systems use different characters, but \n will indicate the end-of-character marker in all operating systems, so your Python scripts can be run on Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux. Another example of these nonprinting characters is \t for tab.

At the iPython console type

string3=”Your\t”+ string1[2:] +”\n”
print(string3)
string3

Now we are ready to start to learn to do interesting things with our variables.

Further References

Google has an introductory tutorial on lists (https://developers.google.com/edu/python/lists), but you may want to wait till after you study the next episode to go through this tutorial. A very complete discussion is at https://www.programiz.com/python-programming/list but it also uses some concepts that we will cover in the next episode.

Strings are a versatile data type and we barely scratched the surface of the string-handling functionality built into Python. Because of this, Python is popular as a text-processing language. A good basic tutorial on strings is at https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_strings.htm

#Type at your console

Numerals=range(1,11)
Numerals[3]
Numerals[3:]
Numerals[4:6]
Numerals.extend(range(11,21))

Numerals=Numerals+range(21,31)
#Python 3
#Numerals.extend(list(range(11,21)))

#Numerals=Numerals+list(range(21,31))

len(Numerals)
Numerals[3]=11
del Numerals[4]#

greeting="Hello World"

hello=greeting[0:5]

greeting2=hello+" there"

output=greeting2+"\n"*2
output
#note the difference at the console
print(output)