Boston Python Workshop 6/Loops

Useful functions related to lists

sorting lists

Use .sort() to sort a list:

>>> names = ["Eliza", "Joe", "Henry", "Harriet", "Wanda", "Pat"]
>>> names.sort()
>>> names
['Eliza', 'Harriet', 'Henry', 'Joe', 'Pat', 'Wanda']

Getting the maximum and minimum values from a list

>>> numbers = [0, 3, 10, -1]
>>> max(numbers)
10
>>> min(numbers)
-1

Generating a list of numbers easily with range()

The range() function returns a list of numbers. This is handy for when you want to generate a list of numbers on the fly instead of creating the list yourself.

>>> range(5)
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

Use range when you want to loop over a bunch of numbers in a list:

>>> numbers = range(5)
>>> for number in numbers:
...     print number * number
...
0
1
4
9
16

We could rewrite the above example like this:

>>> for number in range(5):
...     print number * number
...
0
1
4
9
16