Lecture Six

Lists and Tuples

The CSC213 Team
[2020|2021]
 Topics

▪ Sequences ▪ Copying Lists

▪ Introduction to Lists ▪ Processing Lists
▪ List Slicing ▪ Two-Dimensional Lists
▪ Finding Items in Lists ▪ Tuples
with the in Operator
▪ List Methods and Useful
Built-in Functions
 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
 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
Introduction to Lists (cont’d.)
 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:
 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.
 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
 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
 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 or ordinary string
▪ The += augmented assignment operator can also be
used to concatenate lists
 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
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
 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 in a
list
▪ Returns the index of the first element in the list containing
item
▪ Raises ValueError exception if item not in the list
 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
 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
 Copying Lists
▪ To make a copy of a list you must copy each element
of the list
▪ Two methods to do this:
1. Creating a new empty list
▪ Then use a for loop to add a copy of each element from the
original list to the new list
2. Creating a new empty list
▪ Then concatenate the old list to the new empty list
List1 and List2 Reference the same list
 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
 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
 Two-Dimensional Lists

▪ Two-dimensional list:
▪ A list that contains other lists as its elements
▪ Also known as Nested List
▪ Common to think of two-dimensional lists as having rows and
columns
▪ Useful for working with multiple sets of data
▪ To process data in a Two-dimensional list need to use two
indexes
▪ Typically use nested loops to process
Two-Dimensional Lists
 Two-Dimensional Lists
Subscripts for each element of the scores list
 Tuples

▪ Tuple: an immutable as lists

sequence ▪ Subscript indexing for
retrieving elements
▪ Very similar to a list
▪ Methods such as index
▪ Once it is created it cannot
▪ Built in functions such as
be changed len, min, max
▪ Format: tuple_name = ▪ Slicing expressions
(item1, item2) ▪ The in, +, and * operators
▪ Tuples support operations
 Tuples

▪ Tuples do not support the methods:

▪ append
▪ remove
▪ insert
▪ reverse
▪ sort
 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
 Summary
▪ List methods and built-in
▪ This chapter covered:
functions for lists
▪ Lists, including: ▪ Two-dimensional lists
▪ Repetition and ▪ Tuples, including:
concatenation operators
▪ Immutability
▪ Indexing
▪ Difference from and
▪ Techniques for processing
advantages over lists
lists
▪ Slicing and copying lists