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
• Plotting List Data with the matplotlib
Package

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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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 Plotting Data with
matplotlib
• The matplotlib package is a library for
creating two-dimensional charts and graphs.

• It is not part of the standard Python library,

so you will have to install it separately, after
you have installed Python on your system.

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 Plotting Data with
matplotlib
• To install matplotlib on a Windows system, open a
Command Prompt window and enter this command:
pip install matplotlib

• To install matplotlib on a Mac or Linux system,

open a Terminal window and enter this command:
sudo pip3 install matplotlib

• See Appendix F in your textbook for more

information about packages and the pip utility.

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 Plotting Data with
matplotlib
• To verify the package was installed, start IDLE and
enter this command:

>>> import matplotlib

• If you don't see any error messages, you can

assume the package was properly installed.

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 Plotting Data with
matplotlib
• The matplotlib package contains a module
named pyplot that you will need to import.
• Use the following import statement to
import the module and create an alias named
plt:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

For more information about the import statement, see Appendix E in your textbook.

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Plotting a Line Graph with the
plot Function
• Use the plot function to create a line graph that
connects a series of points with straight lines.
• The line graph has a horizontal X axis, and a vertical
Y axis.
• Each point in the graph is located at a (X,Y)
coordinate.

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 Plotting a Line Graph with the
plot Function
Program 7-19 (line_graph1.py)
1 # This program displays a simple line graph.
2 import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
3
4 def main():
5 # Create lists with the X and Y coordinates of each data point.
6 x_coords = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
7 y_coords = [0, 3, 1, 5, 2]
8
9 # Build the line graph.
10 plt.plot(x_coords, y_coords)
11
12 # Display the line graph.
13 plt.show()
14
15 # Call the main function.
16 main()

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Plotting a Line Graph with the
plot Function
• You can change the lower and upper limits of the X
and Y axes by calling the xlim and ylim functions.
Example:

plt.xlim(xmin=1, xmax=100)
plt.ylim(ymin=10, ymax=50)

• This code does the following:

• Causes the X axis to begin at 1 and end at 100
• Causes the Y axis to begin at 10 and end at 50

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Plotting a Line Graph with the
plot Function
• You can customize each tick mark's label with the xticks
and yticks functions.
• These functions each take two lists as arguments.
• The first argument is a list of tick mark locations
• The second argument is a list of labels to display at the specified
locations.

plt.xticks([0, 1, 2, 3, 4],

['2016', '2017', '2018', '2019', '2020'])

plt.yticks([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
['$0m', '$1m', '$2m', '$3m', '$4m', '$5m'])

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 Program 7-24
1 # This program displays a simple line graph.
2 import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
3
4 def main():
5 # Create lists with the X,Y coordinates of each data point.
6 x_coords = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
7 y_coords = [0, 3, 1, 5, 2]
8
9 # Build the line graph.
10 plt.plot(x_coords, y_coords, marker='o')
11
12 # Add a title.
13 plt.title('Sales by Year')
14
15 # Add labels to the axes.
16 plt.xlabel('Year')
17 plt.ylabel('Sales')
18

Continued…
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 Program 7-24 (continued)
19 # Customize the tick marks.
20 plt.xticks([0, 1, 2, 3, 4],
21 ['2016', '2017', '2018', '2019', '2020'])
22 plt.yticks([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
23 ['$0m', '$1m', '$2m', '$3m', '$4m', '$5m'])
24
25 # Add a grid.
26 plt.grid(True)
27
28 # Display the line graph.
29 plt.show()
30
31 # Call the main function.
32 main()

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 Output of Program 7-24
Displayed by the
Displayed by the
title() function.
yticks() function.

Displayed by the
ylabel() function.

Displayed by the
xticks() function. Displayed by the
xlabel() function.
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 Plotting a Bar Chart
• Use the bar function in the
matplotlib.pyplot module to create a bar
chart.

• The function needs two lists: one with the X

coordinates of each bar's left edge, and another
with the heights of each bar, along the Y axis.

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 Plotting a Bar Chart

left_edges = [0, 10, 20, 30, 40]

heights = [100, 200, 300, 400, 500]

plt.bar(left_edges, heights)
plt.show()

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 Plotting a Bar Chart
• The default width of each bar in a bar graph is 0.8 along the X
axis.
• You can change the bar width by passing a third argument to
the bar function.

left_edges = [0, 10, 20, 30, 40]

heights = [100, 200, 300, 400, 500]
bar_width = 5

plt.bar(left_edges, heights, bar_width)

plt.show()

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 Plotting a Bar Chart
• The bar function has a color parameter that you
can use to change the colors of the bars.
• The argument that you pass into this parameter is a
tuple containing a series of color codes.

Color Code Corresponding Color

'b' Blue
'g' Green
'r' Red
'c' Cyan
'm' Magenta
'y' Yellow
'k' Black
'w' White

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 Plotting a Bar Chart
• Example of how to pass a tuple of color codes as a
keyword argument:

plt.bar(left_edges, heights, color=('r', 'g', 'b', 'w', 'k'))

• The colors of the bars in the resulting bar chart will

be as follows:
• The first bar will be red.
• The second bar will be green.
• The third bar will be blue.
• The fourth bar will be white.
• The fifth bar will be black.

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 Plotting a Bar Chart
• Use the xlabel and ylabel functions to add labels
to the X and Y axes.

• Use the xticks function to display custom tick mark

labels along the X axis

• Use the yticks function to display custom tick mark

labels along the Y axis.

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 Plotting a Pie Chart
• You use the pie function in the
matplotlib.pyplot module to create a pie chart.

• When you call the pie function, you pass a list of

values as an argument.
• The sum of the values will be used as the value of the whole.
• Each element in the list will become a slice in the pie chart.
• The size of a slice represents that element's value as a
percentage of the whole.

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 Plotting a Pie Chart
• Example

values = [20, 60, 80, 40]

plt.pie(values)
plt.show()

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 Plotting a Pie Chart
• The pie function has a labels parameter that you
can use to display labels for the slices in the pie
chart.
• The argument that you pass into this parameter is a
list containing the desired labels, as strings.

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 Plotting a Pie Chart
• Example
sales = [100, 400, 300, 600]
slice_labels = ['1st Qtr', '2nd Qtr', '3rd Qtr', '4th Qtr']
plt.pie(sales, labels=slice_labels)
plt.title('Sales by Quarter')
plt.show()

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 Plotting a Pie Chart
• The pie function automatically changes the color of
the slices, in the following order:
• blue, green, red, cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white.

• You can specify a different set of colors, however, by

passing a tuple of color codes as an argument to the
pie function's colors parameter:

plt.pie(values, colors=('r', 'g', 'b', 'w', 'k'))

• When this statement executes, the colors of the slices in the resulting
pie chart will be red, green, blue, white, and black.

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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
• Plotting charts and graphs with the matplotlib
Package
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