An Introduction to Lists in Python for Beginners

Understanding different list operations like slicing, indexing, min, max, sum, concatenate, multiplication, and len with examples.

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In the last section of this Python Tutorial Series, we talked about the processing and reversing of strings in Python. In this article, we are going to understand Python Lists with some examples. If you are following this Python Tutorial Series, then follow and share the article with your developer community.

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What are Lists in Python? A list is an ordered sequence of values. It is a non-scalar type. You can store any type of value in a list such as an integer, string, float, or list. Lists are mutable, and therefore, one can modify individual elements of a list. Let’s understand all this with an example.

>>> players =['Dhoni', 'Kohli', 'Rohit', 'Sachin', 'Raina']

In the above example, we are storing the player’s name in a list. Note that the elements of a list are enclosed in square brackets, separated by commas. The first element of the list is indexed as 0, just like the characters of the string. Something just like this:

index         element
0              Dhoni
1              Kohli
2              Rohit
3              Sachin
4              Raina

Now, you know that the lists are mutable, and therefore, you can modify individual elements of a list. Let’s understand this with an example. Above we have a list of players. I want to change the name of the player at index 2 to “Bumrah”. You can do this using the following way:

>>> players[2] = 'Bumrah'
>>> print(players)
['Dhoni', 'Kohli', 'Bumrah', 'Sachin', 'Raina']

Next, we create a list of players and their respective scores. For this purpose, we represent each pair of players and the player’s score as a list and form a list of such lists. This type of list is called a two-dimensional list. Let’s understand this with an example.

>>> players = [['Dhoni', 183], ['Kohli', 161], ['Rohit', 264], ['Sachin',200]]

Now, let suppose you want to change the individual score of “Kohli” to 183. You can do that using the following way:

>>> players[1][1] = 183
>>> print(players)
[['Dhoni', 183], ['Kohli', 183], ['Rohit', 264], ['Sachin', 200]]

More List Operations

You can perform multiple operations on a list. Let’s understand this with examples.

>>> list1 = [10,20,30,40,50,60]
>>> list2 = ['Red', 'Black', 'Blue', 'Green']

Concatenation

>>> list3 = list1+list2
>>> list3
[10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 'Red', 'Black', 'Blue', 'Green']

Multiplication

>>> list1*3
[10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60]

Finding the Length of a List

>>> len(list2)
4

Indexing

>>> list1[-2]
50

Slicing

>>> list1[1:4]
[20, 30, 40]

min() Function

>>> min(list2)
'Black'

max() Function

>>> max(list1)
60

sum() Function

>>> sum(list1)
210

Member Operator in

>>> 35 in list1
False
>>> 'Blue' in list2
True

You can also iterate over the element of a list.

>>> list2 = ['Red', 'Black', 'Blue', 'Green']
>>> for color in list2:
        print(color)
Red
Black
Blue
Green

Well, that’s it for this article. In the next article, we will look after how the built-in functions perform on a list.

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Thanks for reading.

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