Do you want to find the maximum of a Python list? This article gives you everything you need to know to master the max() function in Python. Description Python’s built-in max() function returns the maximum element of a list or its generalization (an iterable). Syntax The syntax of the max() function is as follows: Arguments … Read more
Summary: There are only three best ways to reverse the order of the list elements: list.reverse() — Best if you want to reverse the elements of list in place. list[::-1] — Best if you want to write concise code to return a new list with reversed elements. reversed(list) — Best if you want to iterate … Read more
Summary: To convert a dictionary to a list of tuples, use the dict.items() method to obtain an iterable of (key, value) pairs and convert it to a list using the list(…) constructor: list(dict.items()). To modify each key value pair before storing it in the list, you can use the list comprehension statement [(k’, v’) for … Read more
Problem: Given are two lists l1 and l2. You want to perform either of the following: 1. Boolean Comparison: Compare the lists element-wise and return True if your comparison metric returns True for all pairs of elements, and otherwise False. 2. Difference: Find the difference of elements in the first list but not in the … Read more
Short answer: The most Pythonic way to compute the difference between two lists l1 and l2 is the list comprehension statement [x for x in l1 if x not in set(l2)]. This works even if you have duplicate list entries, it maintains the original list ordering, and it’s efficient due to the constant runtime complexity … Read more
To check if two unordered lists x and y are identical, compare the converted sets with set(x) == set(y). However, this loses all information about duplicated elements. To consider duplicates, compare the sorted lists with sorted(x) == sorted(y). Due to the efficient merge-sort-like implementation of the sorted() function, this is quite fast for almost-sorted lists. … Read more
The most Pythonic way to check if two ordered lists l1 and l2 are identical, is to use the l1 == l2 operator for element-wise comparison. If all elements are equal and the length of the lists are the same, the return value is True. Problem: Given are two lists l1 and l2. You want … Read more
Answer: The simplest, most straightforward, and most readable way to convert a tuple to a list is Python’s built-in list(tuple) function. You can pass any iterable (such as a tuple, another list, or a set) as an argument into this so-called constructor function and it returns a new list data structure that contains all elements … Read more
Python cheat sheets are the 80/20 principle applied to coding: learn 80% of the language features in 20% of the time.Download and pin this cheat sheet to your wall until you feel confident using all these tricks. Download PDF for Printing Try It Yourself: Exercise: Modify each function and play with the output! Here’s the … Read more
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
To convert a list lst of strings to a string, use the ”.join(lst) method with an empty separator string between the elements. If you have a list of objects, first convert each element to a string and join the result with the generator expression ”.join(str(x) for x in lst). Problem: Given a list of elements. … Read more
The method os.path.exists(‘file.txt’) returns True if the file ‘file.txt’ exists, and False otherwise. To use it, import the os module first with import os. If you want to check if a file exists at a given path, use the standard path notation ‘/file/at/path/file.txt’ as a prefix. The web is full of guides that show you … Read more