Finding the last item in a list

Question

I know how to do this, but I was wondering which method was more pythionic. The two I have are these:

a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
print a[::-1][0] #Method 1
print a[len(a) - 1] #Method 2

So which is the better of the two to do? They both work.

EDIT

Hi, sorry for the really bad question. I completely forgot about [-1]...

Yeah... forgot about that one... – Bottersnike Sep 03 '15 at 15:29 — Bottersnike, Sep 03 '15 at 15:29

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 03 '15 at 06:48

6

You can use negative indexes to index from the end of a list.

a[-1]

answered Sep 03 '15 at 06:48

Cyphase

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 03 '15 at 06:53

4

you need to know about python index, how it works:

my_list = [1,2,3,4]

  0  1  2  3    #positive index
  1  2  3  4    # list  element
 -4 -3 -2 -1    # negative index

so if you want last element you can simply do

my_list[-1]

answered Sep 03 '15 at 06:53

Hackaholic

2 Answers2