sashahafner / pystupid

Some notes on Python syntax and more
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Extract/set last element(s) #12

Open sashahafner opened 8 months ago

sashahafner commented 8 months ago

Something better in Python than in R. From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/930397/how-do-i-get-the-last-element-of-a-list

some_list[-1] is the shortest and most Pythonic.

In fact, you can do much more with this syntax. The some_list[-n] syntax gets the nth-to-last element. So some_list[-1] gets the last element, some_list[-2] gets the second to last, etc, all the way down to some_list[-len(some_list)], which gives you the first element.

You can also set list elements in this way. For instance:

>>> some_list = [1, 2, 3]
>>> some_list[-1] = 5 # Set the last element
>>> some_list[-2] = 3 # Set the second to last element
>>> some_list
[1, 3, 5]