loader image
Skip to main content
If you continue browsing this website, you agree to our policies:
x
Completion requirements

Read this for more on indexing.

1. Lists - A list is a sequence

Like a string, a list is a sequence of values. In a string, the values are characters; in a list, they can be any type. The values in a list are called elements or sometimes items.

There are several ways to create a new list; the simplest is to enclose the elements in square brackets ([ and ]):

[10,20,30,40]
['crunchy frog','ram bladder','lark vomit']

The first example is a list of four integers. The second is a list of three strings. The elements of a list don’t have to be the same type. The following list contains a string, a float, an integer, and (lo!) another list:

['spam',2.0,5,[10,20]]

A list within another list is nested.

A list that contains no elements is called an empty list; you can create one with empty brackets, [].

As you might expect, you can assign list values to variables:

>>> cheeses =['Cheddar','Edam','Gouda']
>>> numbers =[42,123]
>>> empty =[]
>>>print(cheeses, numbers, empty)
['Cheddar','Edam','Gouda'][42,123][]

Source: Allen B. Downey, http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython2/html/thinkpython2011.html
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License.