PROGRAMMING IN PYTHON

Session July 2020

LIST AND TUPLES

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 SEQUENCES

Sequence: an object that contains multiple items of

data
The items are stored in sequence one after another
Python provides different types of sequences,
including lists and tuples
The difference between these is that a list is mutable and a
tuple is immutable

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 INTRODUCTION TO LISTS
List: an object that contains multiple data items
Element: An item in a list
Format: list = [item1, item2, etc.]
Can hold items of different types
print function can be used to display an entire list
list() function can convert certain types of objects
to lists

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INTRODUCTION TO LISTS

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The Repetition Operator and Iterating over a List

Repetition operator: makes multiple copies of a list

and joins them together
The * symbol is a repetition operator when applied to a
sequence and an integer
Sequence is left operand, number is right
General format: list * n
You can iterate over a list using a for loop
Format: for x in list:

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 Indexing
Index: a number specifying the position of an element
in a list
Enables access to individual element in list
Index of first element in the list is 0, second element is 1, and
n’th element is n-1
Negative indexes identify positions relative to the end of the list
The index -1 identifies the last element, -2 identifies the next to last
element, etc.

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 The len function
An IndexError exception is raised if an invalid
index is used
len function: returns the length of a sequence such
as a list
Example: size = len(my_list)
Returns the number of elements in the list, so the index of last
element is len(list)-1
Can be used to prevent an IndexError exception when
iterating over a list with a loop

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 Lists Are Mutable
Mutable sequence: the items in the sequence can be
changed
Lists are mutable, and so their elements can be changed
An expression such as
list[1] = new_value can be used to assign a new
value to a list element
Must use a valid index to prevent raising of an IndexError
exception

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 Concatenating Lists
Concatenate: join two things together
The + operator can be used to concatenate two lists
– Cannot concatenate a list with another data type, such as a
number
The += augmented assignment operator can also be
used to concatenate lists

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 List Slicing
Slice: a span of items that are taken from a sequence
List slicing format: list[start : end]
Span is a list containing copies of elements from start up to,
but not including, end
If start not specified, 0 is used for start index
If end not specified, len(list) is used for end index
Slicing expressions can include a step value and negative
indexes relative to end of list

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 List Slicing

Both positive and negative indices can

be specified:

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 List Slicing

Omitting the first index starts

the slice at the beginning of
the list, and omitting the
second index extends the
slice to the end of the list:

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Finding Items in Lists with the in Operator

You can use the in operator to determine whether an

item is contained in a list
General format: item in list
Returns True if the item is in the list, or False if it is not in the
list
Similarly you can use the not in operator to
determine whether an item is not in a list

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List Methods and Useful Built-in Functions

append(item): used to add items to a list – item is

appended to the end of the existing list
index(item): used to determine where an item is
located in a list
Returns the index of the first element in the list containing item
Raises ValueError exception if item not in the list

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List Methods and Useful Built-in Functions

insert(index, item): used to insert item at

position index in the list
sort(): used to sort the elements of the list in
ascending order
remove(item): removes the first occurrence of item
in the list
reverse(): reverses the order of the elements in the
list

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List Methods and Useful Built-in Functions

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List Methods and Useful Built-in Functions

del statement: removes an element from a specific

index in a list
General format: del list[i]
min and max functions: built-in functions that
returns the item that has the lowest or highest value
in a sequence
The sequence is passed as an argument

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 Copying Lists
To make a copy of a list you must copy each element
of the list
Two methods to do this:
Creating a new empty list and using a for loop to add a copy of each
element from the original list to the new list
Creating a new empty list and concatenating the old list to the new
empty list

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Copying Lists

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 Processing Lists
List elements can be used in calculations
To calculate total of numeric values in a list use loop
with accumulator variable
To average numeric values in a list:
Calculate total of the values
Divide total of the values by len(list)
List can be passed as an argument to a function

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 Processing Lists
A function can return a reference to a list
To save the contents of a list to a file:
Use the file object’s writelines method
Does not automatically write \n at then end of each item
Use a for loop to write each element and \n
To read data from a file use the file object’s
readlines method

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 Exercise : Lists
1. Can a Python list hold a mixture of integers and strings?

2. What happens if you attempt to access an element of a list using

a negative index?

3. Given the statement lst = [10, -4, 11, 29]

(a) What expression represents the very first element of lst?

(b) What expression represents the very last element of lst?

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 Exercise : Lists

(c) What is lst[0]?

(d) What is lst[3]?
(e) What is lst[1]?
(f ) What is lst[-1]?
(g) What is lst[-4]?
(h) Is the expression lst[3.0] legal or illegal?

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 Exercise : Lists
4. Given the list lst = [20, 1, -34, 40, -8, 60, 1, 3]
evaluate the following expressions:

a) lst (f) lst[-22:3]

b) lst[0:3] (g) lst[4:]
c) lst[4:8] (h) lst[:]
d) lst[4:33] (i) lst[:4]
e) lst[-5:-3] (j) lst[1:5]

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 Exercise : Lists
4. Given the list lst = [20, 1, -34, 40, -8, 60, 1, 3]
evaluate the following expressions:

a) lst (f) lst[-22:3]

b) lst[0:3] (g) lst[4:]
c) lst[4:8] (h) lst[:]
d) lst[4:33] (i) lst[:4]
e) lst[-5:-3] (ii) (j) lst[1:5]

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 Exercise : Lists
5. Complete the following function that adds up all the positive
values in a list of integers.

For example, if list a contains the elements 3,−3,5,2,−1, and 2,

the call sum_positive(a) would evaluate to 12, since 3+5+2+2 =
12. The function returns zero if the list is empty.

def sum_positive(a):
# Add your code...

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 Tuples
Tuple: an immutable sequence
Very similar to a list
Once it is created it cannot be changed
Format: tuple_name = (item1, item2)
Tuples support operations as lists
Subscript indexing for retrieving elements
Methods such as index
Built in functions such as len, min, max
Slicing expressions
The in, +, and * operators
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 Tuples
Tuples do not support the methods:
append
remove
insert
reverse
sort

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 Tuples
Advantages for using tuples over lists:
Processing tuples is faster than processing lists
Tuples are safe
Some operations in Python require use of tuples
list() function: converts tuple to list
tuple() function: converts list to tuple

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