Take a segment from a list

Question

Other than using a loop, is there a method to take a segment from a list.

For example, if I had the list:

l = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0]

and I wanted to take a segment from the 3rd item to the 5th I would end up with...

segment = [4,5,6]

I know this can be done with a loop but I was wondering if there was a more "pythonic" aproach?

I don't know the answer to your question, but I just wanted to say that __1__ isn't a valid variable name. I'm not sure if it's different with lists... — Ethan Bierlein, Apr 22 '14 at 00:14
@TheNotGoodAtCodeGuy: I think it's a lower-case L, but lower-case L is discouraged as a var name for precisely that reason, it's too easy to confuse with 1. — Marius, Apr 22 '14 at 00:15
That's why PEP8 recommends against using `l` as a variable name — John La Rooy, Apr 22 '14 at 00:16

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:05

l[3:6] is what you are looking for.

This uses list slicing. 3 is the start index. 6 is the end index. We mention 6 as the end index (even though index of 6 is 5) because the slice notation requires the index of the element after the last element we need to be part of the segment.

Demo:

>>> l = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0]
>>> l[3:6]
[4, 5, 6]

This answer explains how slicing on Python lists work - Explain Python's slice notation

Take a segment from a list

1 Answers1