Slice assignment is a little-used, beautiful Python feature to replace a slice with another sequence. Simply select the slice you want to replace on the left and the values to replace it on the right side of the equation. For example, the slice assignment list[2:4] = [42, 42] replaces the list elements with index 2 and 3 with the value 42.
>>> lst = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] >>> # Slicing >>> lst[2:4] [3, 4] >>> # Slice Assignment >>> lst[2:4] = ['Alice', 'Bob'] >>> lst [1, 2, 'Alice', 'Bob', 5] >>> lst[2:4] ['Alice', 'Bob']
I’ve recorded a quick video that shows you how the slice assignment feature works in a Python One-Liner:
Play With Slice Assignment in Your Interactive Shell
Before I’ll explain it to you, feel free to play with this feature yourself:
One of my Finxter users, Mike, asked the following great question:
“I was going through a lot of slicing puzzles on the Finxter site, I came across this:
letters = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g'] letters[1:] = [ ] print(letters)
I originally answered [‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’, ‘g’] but got it wrong.”
This is the point where I want to open your knowledge gap: what’s the output of this puzzle instead?
** For your convenience, you can also solve this specific puzzle on the Finxter app here. **
“As the answer is [‘a’], I immediately became curious because that’s [not] the answer if we use this code
letters = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g'] print(letters[1:]) # ['b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g']
Why do these work differently?
Thanks, I really appreciate your time and all of the content you provide each day.”
Again, great question. Mike did most of the heavy lifting himself. The answer is simple (if you have read my slicing booklet already):
- The first version is slice assignment.
- The second version is basic slicing.
They are not the same. You should not confuse slicing and slice assignment. Here is the difference:
1) S
x = list("coffeebreak")
y = list("python")
y = x[0:4]
print(''.join(y))
# 'coff'2) Slice assignment replaces the selected slice in the original sequence y with the value specified on the right-hand side of the equation:
x = list("coffeebreak")
y = list("python")
y[0:2] = x
print(''.join(y))
# 'coffeebreakthon'Note that the two code snippets also demonstrate how you can convert a string to a list and convert a list back to a string.
This Python lesson is based on my free “Coffee Break Python” Email Series. Join us. It’s fun! ?
Where to Go From Here?
Enough theory. Let’s get some practice!
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