The Most Pythonic Way to Check If a List Contains an Element

The standard way of checking if an element exists in a list is to use the in keyword. For example, ‘Alice’ in [1, ‘Alice’, 3] will return True while the same returns False for ‘Bob’. If you need to check more complicated conditions, use the any(condition(x) for x in list) function with a generator expression. … Read more

Convert List to Tuple | The Most Pythonic Way

Answer: The simplest, most straightforward, and most readable way to convert a list to a tuple is Python’s built-in tuple(list) function. You can pass any iterable (such as a list, another tuple, or a set) as an argument into this so-called constructor function and it returns a new tuple data structure that contains all elements … Read more

string.join(list) vs list.join(string) | Why Python’s Creators Chose The Former

If you’re like me, you may have asked yourself the following question: Why is it string.join(list) instead of list.join(string) in Python? ? The join method works with any iterable, not just with lists. Therefore, you’d have to implement it in hundreds of classes instead of just one (in the string class). Additionally, join() works only … Read more

How to Use Python’s Join() on a List of Objects (Not Strings)?

The most Pythonic way to concatenate a list of objects is the expression ”.join(str(x) for x in lst) that converts each object to a string using the built-in str(…) function in a generator expression. You can concatenate the resulting list of strings using the join() method on the empty string as a delimiter. The result … Read more

How to Get a List Slice with Arbitrary Indices in Python?

To extract elements with specific indices from a Python list, use slicing list[start:stop:step]. If you cannot use slicing because there’s no pattern in the indices you want to access, use the list comprehension statement [lst[i] for i in indices], assuming your indices are stored in the variable indices. People always want to know the most … Read more

How to Join Specific List Elements in Python?

To join specific list elements (e.g., with indices 0, 2, and 4) and return the joined string that’s the concatenation of all those, use the expression ”.join([lst[i] for i in [0, 2, 4]]). The list comprehension statement creates a list consisting of elements lst[0], lst[2], and lst[4]. The ”.join() method concatenates those elements using the … Read more

Python List Indexing

πŸ›‘ Note: Python has zero-based indexing, i.e., the index of the first element is 0, and the index of the i-th element is (i-1). Not considering zero-based indexing but assuming the i-th element has index i is a common source of bugs! Here’s an example that demonstrates how list indexing works in Python: πŸƒ Training … Read more