CHAPTER 7

Lists and
Tuples

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 Topics
• Sequences
• Introduction to Lists
• List Slicing
• Finding Items in Lists with the in
Operator
• List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions

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 Topics (cont’d.)
Copying Lists
Processing Lists
Two-Dimensional Lists
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 (cont’d.)

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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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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 (cont’d.)
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 (cont’d.)
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 (cont’d.)

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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 (cont’d.)
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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 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
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 Two-Dimensional Lists
(cont’d.)

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 Two-Dimensional Lists
(cont’d.)

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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 (cont’d.)
Tuples do not support the methods:
append
remove
insert
reverse
sort

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 Tuples (cont’d.)
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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 Summary
This chapter covered:
Lists, including:
Repetition and concatenation operators
Indexing
Techniques for processing lists
Slicing and copying lists
List methods and built-in functions for lists
Two-dimensional lists
Tuples, including:
Immutability
Difference from and advantages over lists

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