Lists

Reading

Chapter 10.

Key ideas

From chapter 10:

• A list is an ordered collection of items that can be of any type, e.g., ["Joy and Beauty of Data", 2017].
• List creation, e.g., row = ["black", "blue", "orange"]
• Determining list length: len
• Accessing list elements
• List memebership: in and not in
• List concatenation: +
• List repetition: *
• List slices
• Lists are mutable (unlike strings)
  • Replacement: row[0] = "yellow"
  • Deletion: row[1:3] = []
  • Deletion: del(row[0])
  • Insertion: row[2:2] = ["red", "magenta"]
• List aliasing: row_2 = row
• List cloning: row_2 = row[:]
• List methods:
  • append(item)
  • insert(position, item)
  • pop() or pop(position)
  • sort()
  • reverse()
  • index(item)
  • count(item)
  • remove(item)
• List append vs. list concatenation
• For loop list traversal
  • by element
  • by position
• Function parameters as lists
• Pure functions
• Functions returning lists
• List comprehensions
• Nested lists
• Creating lists from strings using split()
• Creating strings from lists using join()
• Tuples

Active learning

Activity 1

Work the following exercises:

• Create a list called myList with the following six items: 76, 92.3, “hello”, True, 4, 76. Do it with both append and with concatenation, one item at a time.
• Starting with the list of the previous exercise, write Python statements to do the following:
  1. Append “apple” and 76 to the list.
  2. Insert the value “cat” at position 3.
  3. Insert the value 99 at the start of the list.
  4. Find the index of “hello”.
  5. Count the number of 76s in the list.
  6. Remove the first occurrence of 76 from the list.
  7. Remove True from the list using pop and index.

Activity 2

• This page contains 2013 census information when the total population of the U.S. was 316,128,839.
• The file nested-lists.py contains information about the 10 most populous states.
• Add a function to nested-lists.py that calculates and returns the total population of the information passed into it. Print this value after the function returns it.
• Modify the program to also print the percentage of the U.S. population that lives in the 10 most populated states.
• Modify the populations variable to include information about whether each state is landlocked. Consider a landlocked state to be one that does not touch the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.
• Modify the program to also calculate and print the percentage of the population in the 10 most populated states that live in a landlocked state. Time permitting, make other interesting enhancements.