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 over all elements of a list in reversed order without changing the original list.
The method list.reverse() can be 37% faster than reversed(list) because no new object has to be created.
When I read over code from my students, I often realize that they know one or two ways of solving a problem—but they don’t know which way is the best one for a particular problem. In this article, you’ll learn how to reverse a list—and which is the most Pythonic way in a given problem setting. So, let’s dive right into it!
Problem: Given a list of elements. How to reverse the order of the elements in the (flat) list.
Example: Say, you’ve got the following list:
['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora']
Your goal is to reverse the elements to obtain the following result:
['Dora', 'Carl', 'Bob', 'Alice']
There are multiple ways to reverse a list. Here’s a quick overview:
Exercise: Run the code. In which case would you use the third method? Does it have any advantage compared to the first one?
Let’s dive into each of the methods in greater detail!
Method 1: Reverse a List In-Place with list.reverse()
To reverse a list in place and change the order of the elements in the original list, use the list.reverse() method. As the original list is modified and no new list is returned, this method has side effects which may (or may not) be what you need.
# Method 1: list.reverse() names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora'] names.reverse() print(names) # ['Dora', 'Carl', 'Bob', 'Alice']
The order of the elements of the original list in the variable names has reversed.
Method 2: Reverse a List with Slicing [::-1]
Slicing is a concept to carve out a substring from a given string.
Use slicing notation s[start:stop:step] to access every step-th element starting from index start (included) and ending in index stop (excluded).
All three arguments are optional, so you can skip them to use the default values (start=0, stop=len(lst), step=1). For example, the expression s[2:4] from string 'hello' carves out the slice 'll' and the expression s[:3:2] carves out the slice 'hl'.
You can use a negative step size (e.g., -1) to slice from the right to the left in inverse order. Here’s how you can use this to reverse a list in Python:
# Method 2: Reverse a List with Slicing names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora'] names = names[::-1] print(names) # ['Dora', 'Carl', 'Bob', 'Alice']
This method is most concise and highly performant because the slice has an efficient memory representation. That’s why expert coders will often prefer slicing with negative step size over the list.reverse() method.
Method 3: Reverse a List with Iterator reversed(list)
The list.reverse() method reverses a list in place (it’s a method—and methods tend to modify the objects on which they are called). But what if you want to reverse a list and return a new list object? While you can use slicing for this, an even better way is to use the reversed(list) built-in Python function.
The reversed() function has one big advantage over slicing: it returns an iterator object rather than a full-fledged list. Compared to a list, an iterator has a more memory-friendly representation and if you don’t need a list, it’s usually best to live with an iterator (e.g., to iterate over all elements in reverse order).
# Method 3: reversed() names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora'] names = reversed(names) print(list(names)) # ['Dora', 'Carl', 'Bob', 'Alice']
However, in this code snippet, you actually want a list so you need to convert the iterator to a list using the list(...) constructor. In this case, it’s better to use slicing names[::-1] as shown in the previous method.
Method 4: Reverse a List with Indexing and a Simple Loop
Beginner coders and coders coming from other programming language often like to use indexing schemes to manipulate sequence elements (they don’t know better). For comprehensibility, I wanted to include the following method to reverse a list using nothing but simple indexing, a for loop, and the range() function.
names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora']
l = []
for i in range(len(names)-1, -1, -1):
l.append(names[i])
print(l)
# ['Dora', 'Carl', 'Bob', 'Alice']The range(len(names)-1, -1, -1) function returns an iterator that starts with the index len(names)-1 which is the last index in the variable names. It goes all the way to 0 (inclusive) using negative step size -1.
Method 5: Reverse a List with Negative Indexing
The previous code snippet can be optimized (in my opinion) by using negative indexing. In any way, it’s good if you know how to properly use negative indexing in Python—that is—to access the elements from the right rather than from the left.
| Element | Alice | Bob | Carl | Dora |
| Index | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Negative Index | -4 | -3 | -2 | -1 |
Here’s how you can leverage negative indexing to access the elements in reverse order in a basic for loop:
# Method 5: Negative Indexing
names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora']
l = []
for i in range(1, len(names) + 1):
l.append(names[-i])
print(l)
# ['Dora', 'Carl', 'Bob', 'Alice']Note that the last value taken on by variable i is i=4. Used as a negative index, you access the element names[-4] == Alice last.
Performance Evaluation
Let’s compare the speed of those five methods!
In the following code, you compare the runtime of each of the five methods to reverse a list with five elements and print the time it takes to execute it 10,000 times to the shell.
Exercise: Click “Run” and see which methods wins in your browser! How long does it take to reverse a list with 100,000 elements?
You can also copy&paste the code and run it on your computer:
def reverse1():
names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora']
names.reverse()
def reverse2():
names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora']
names = names[::-1]
def reverse3():
names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora']
names = reversed(names)
def reverse4():
names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora']
l = []
for i in range(len(names)-1, -1, -1):
l.append(names[i])
def reverse5():
names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Dora']
l = []
for i in range(1, len(names) + 1):
l.append(names[-i])
import timeit
print('M1: ', timeit.timeit(reverse1, number=10000), '--> list.reverse()')
print('M2: ', timeit.timeit(reverse2, number=10000), '--> slicing')
print('M3: ', timeit.timeit(reverse3, number=10000), '--> reversed()')
print('M4: ', timeit.timeit(reverse4, number=10000), '--> loop')
print('M5: ', timeit.timeit(reverse5, number=10000), '--> loop + negative index')The most performant method on my computer is the list.reverse() method:
M1: 0.0012140999999999957 --> list.reverse() M2: 0.0016616999999999882 --> slicing M3: 0.0019155999999999618 --> reversed() M4: 0.005595399999999973 --> loop M5: 0.006663499999999989 --> loop + negative index
It’s interesting to see that the least readable and least concise methods 4 and 5 are also slowest! Note that we didn’t convert the iterator returned by the reversed() method to a list—otherwise, it would have added a few milliseconds to the result.
While this is not a scientific performance evaluation, it indicates that “standing on the shoulders of giants” by reusing existing code is usually a good idea!
Conclusion
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 over all elements of a list in reversed order without changing the original list.
You have seen in the evaluation that the method list.reverse() can be 37% faster than reversed(list) because no new object has to be created.
Where to Go From Here?
Enough theory. Let’s get some practice!
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