CSBP119

Algorithms & Problem Solving

CIT, UAEU

Chapter 7
Lists & Tuples

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Topics (1 of 2)

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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Topics (2 of 2)

• Copying Lists
• Processing Lists
• List Comprehensions
• Two-Dimensional Lists
• Tuples

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Introduction to Lists (1 of 2)

• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

Introduction to Lists (2 of 2)

Copyright © 2022 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 7-6

 The Repetition Operator

• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Iterating over a List

• You can iterate over a list using a for loop

• Format: for x in list:

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Indexing

• Index: a number specifying the position of an

element in a list
• 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.

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Slicing

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

Finding Items in Lists with the in
Operator

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (1 of 12)
• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (2 of 12)
• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (3 of 12)
Table 7-1 A few of the list methods

Method Description
append(item) .Adds item to the end of the list

index(item) .Returns the index of the first element whose value is equal to item
.A ValueError exception is raised if item is not found in the list
insert(index, item) Inserts item into the list at the specified index. When an item is inserted into a
list, the list is expanded in size to accommodate the new item. The item that
was previously at the specified index, and all the items after it, are shifted by
one position toward the end of the list. No exceptions will occur if you specify an
invalid index. If you specify an index beyond the end of the list, the item will be
added to the end of the list. If you use a negative index that specifies an invalid
.position, the item will be inserted at the beginning of the list
)(sort Sorts the items in the list so they appear in ascending order (from the lowest
.value to the highest value)
remove(item) Removes the first occurrence of item from the list. A ValueError exception
.is raised if item is not found in the list
)(reverse .Reverses the order of the items in the list

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (4 of 12)
• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (5 of 12)
• append example:

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (6 of 12)
• index example:

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (7 of 12)
• insert example:

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (8 of 12)
• sort example:

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (9 of 12)
• remove example:

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (10 of 12)
• reverse example:

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (11 of 12)
• del example:

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Methods and Useful Built-in
Functions (12 of 12)
• min and max example:

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Copying Lists (1 of 2)

• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Copying Lists (2 of 2)

Figure 7-5 list1 and list2 reference the same list

Copyright © 2022 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 7 - 31

 Processing Lists (1 of 2)

• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Processing Lists (2 of 2)

• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Comprehensions (1 of 7)

• List comprehension: a concise expression that

creates a new list by iterating over the elements
of an existing list.

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Comprehensions (2 of 7)

• The following code uses a for loop to make a

copy of a list:
list1 = [1, 2, 3, 4]
list2 = []
 
for item in list1:
list2.append(item)
• The following code uses a list comprehension to
make a copy of a list:

list1 = [1, 2, 3, 4]
list2 = [item for item in list1]

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Comprehensions (3 of 7)

• The iteration expression works like a for loop

• In this example, it iterates over the elements of list1
• Each time it iterates, the target variable item is assigned
the value of an element.
• At the end of each iteration, the value of the result
expression is appended to the new list.

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Comprehensions (4 of 7)

list1 = [1, 2, 3, 4]
list2 = [item**2 for item in list1]

• After this code executes, list2 will contain the values

[1, 4, 9, 16]

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Comprehensions (5 of 7)

str_list = ['Winken', 'Blinken', 'Nod']

len_list = [len(s) for s in str_list]

• After this code executes, len_list will contain the

values [6, 7, 3]

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Comprehensions (6 of 7)
• You can use an if clause in a list comprehension to
select only certain elements when processing a list
list1 = [1, 12, 2, 20, 3, 15, 4]
list2 = []
 
for n in list1:
if n < 10:
list2.append(n)

Works the same as…

list1 = [1, 12, 2, 20, 3, 15, 4]

list2 = [item for item in list1 if item < 10]

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 List Comprehensions (7 of 7)

list1 = [1, 12, 2, 20, 3, 15, 4]

list2 = [item for item in list1 if item < 10]

• After this code executes, list2 will contain [1, 2, 3, 4]

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Two-Dimensional Lists (1 of 3)

• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Two-Dimensional Lists (2 of 3)

Figure 7-8 A two-dimensional list

Copyright © 2022 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 7 - 42

 Two-Dimensional Lists (3 of 3)

Figure 7-10 Subscripts for each element of the scores list

Copyright © 2022 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 7 - 43

 Tuples (1 of 3)

• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Tuples (2 of 3)

• Tuples do not support the methods:

• append
• remove
• insert
• reverse
• sort

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 Tuples (3 of 3)

• 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.

 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

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd.