What is the best practice to initialize an empty list in python ([] or list())?

Question

I'm new to python and I've seen two different ways to initialize an empty list:

# way 1    
empty_list = []

# way 2
other_empty_list = list()

Is there a "preferred" way to do it? Maybe one way is better for certain conditions than the other?

Thank you

Hello and welcome Dan.py. It seems like this issue has been answered but if you are unfamiliar with "list comprehension" I would recommend checking it out. — Brett La Pierre, May 23 '20 at 18:44

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 23 '20 at 18:47

2

[] is the pythonic way.
[] way is quite efficient as you can see from below image.

answered May 23 '20 at 18:47

Shazib Shabir

abhishek lomsh · Answer 2 · 2020-05-23T18:44:11.193

-1

No there isn't much of a difference, you can neglect the difference and pick anyone of them

As most of the times it's a one or limited execution any difference in execution won't have much impact

edited May 23 '20 at 18:44

answered May 23 '20 at 18:37

abhishek lomsh

score -3 · Answer 3 · answered May 23 '20 at 18:35

-3

Using parenthesis will create a tuple, which is immutable. A list uses brackets.

answered May 23 '20 at 18:35

donnieth65

3

This is wrong. Both statements result in list. – Code Pope May 23 '20 at 18:37
Not according to my textbook on python. – donnieth65 May 23 '20 at 18:41
Just run this statement in your compliler: `type(list()) == type([])` and will get `True`. – Code Pope May 23 '20 at 18:44
I checked and what actually creates a tupple is the , not the () – Dan.py Oct 23 '21 at 10:17

3 Answers3