Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Iterate through lists and strings
• Create and iterate through ranges
• Use list comprehension to write concise loops

Iterating over lists and strings

In Python we have a few ways of iterating over lists and strings. One of the most common types of loops is a for in loop; while loops are also common. Let's see what those look like.

for in

The most common way of iterating over a list is a for in loop. The syntax is for ELEMENT in LIST:. As with if statements, don't forget about the colon!

values = [1,2,3,4]

for val in values:
    print(val) 

# 1
# 2
# 3
# 4

for char in "awesome":
    print(char)

# a
# w
# e
# s
# o
# m
# e

Sometimes you may want to have access to the element's index in the list as well as the element itself. In this case, you can pass the list into the enumerate function. You'll need to name two variables in the for loop: the first will refer to the current index, the second will refer to the current element:

for idx, char in enumerate("awesome"):
    print(idx, char)

# 0 a
# 1 w
# 2 e
# 3 s
# 4 o
# 5 m
# 6 e

while

You can also do a while loop with Python, but this is a bit less common when iterating:

i = 0
while i < 5:
    print(i)
    i +=1

# 0
# 1
# 2
# 3
# 4

If you ever want to move to the next step of the iteration, you can prematurely break out of the current iteration with the the continue keyword. Similarly, you can exit from a loop entirely using the break keyword.

for num in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]:
    if num % 2 == 0:
        continue
    elif num > 5:
        break
    print(num)

# 1
# 3
# 5
# the loop continues before the print statement if num is even,
# and it ends entirely when num is 6, so the last odd number doesn't get printed.   

range

In Python we can also create ranges, which represent a range of numbers, with the following syntax: range(start,stop,step). Note that the range is not inclusive. In other words, range(1,4) will include 1, 2, and 3, but not 4!

# We can do some pretty cool things with range
(a,b,c,d) = range(4)
a # 0
b # 1
c # 2
d # 3

for num in range(4,10):
    print(num)

# 4
# 5
# 6
# 7
# 8
# 9

# Note that the chr functions takes in a number
# and returns the ascii character for the number
capital_letters = []
for num in range(65,91):
    capital_letters.append(chr(num))

capital_letters
# Output:['A','B','C','D','E','F','G','H','I','J',
#   'K','L','M','N','O','P','Q','R',
#   'S','T','U','V','W','X','Y','Z']

Ranges take up less memory than lists, so if you find yourself needing a bunch of numbers that increment by the same amount each time, try to use a range instead of a list.

List Comprehension

List comprehensions are one of the most powerful tools in Python. They allow you to build lists in a more concise way, often in a single line. List comprehensions are a wonderful alternative to loops!

One way to use a list comprehension is to transform a set of values from a range or another list into some new set of values. This is sometimes referred to as a mapping opration. Here are a few examples:

# return a list of squares
[num**2 for num in range(10)] # [0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]

[chr(num) for num in range(65,91)]
# Output:['A','B','C','D','E','F','G','H','I','J',
#   'K','L','M','N','O','P','Q','R',
#   'S','T','U','V','W','X','Y', 'Z']

We can also put if statements inside of our list comprehensions to filter out certain transformed values!

# option 1 without list comprehension
vowels = []
for letter in 'awesome':
    if letter in ['a','e','i','o','u']:
        vowels.append(letter)

print(vowels) # ['a', 'e', 'o', 'e']

# option 2 with list comprehension
# In this example, the first letter is the value that we want in the new list
# and the if portion is the filter step
vowels = [letter for letter in 'awesome' if letter in ['a','e','i','o','u']]
print(vowels) # ['a', 'e', 'o', 'e']

# Count of 3 letter words in a string
len([word for word in "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".split(" ") if len(word) == 3])

# figure out the length
    # for each word in the string "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" split(" ") into an array
        # if the length of each word is 3

For longer list comprehensions, we can also split it into multiple lines for readability:

len([
    word
    for word in "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".split(" ")
    if len(word) == 3
])

The syntax for list comprehension takes some getting used to, but keep practicing and you will start to find it very useful.