Learning Python, 4th Edition

Chapter 8. Lists and Dictionaries

This chapter presents the list and dictionary object types, both of which are collections of other objects. These two types are the main workhorses in almost all Python scripts. As you’ll see, both types are remarkably flexible: they can be changed in-place, can grow and shrink on demand, and may contain and be nested in any other kind of object. By leveraging these types, you can build up and process arbitrarily rich information structures in your scripts.

Lists

The next stop on our built-in object tour is the Python list. Lists are Python’s most flexible ordered collection object type. Unlike strings, lists can contain any sort of object: numbers, strings, and even other lists. Also, unlike strings, lists may be changed in-place by assignment to offsets and slices, list method calls, deletion statements, and more—they are mutable objects.

Python lists do the work of most of the collection data structures you might have to implement manually in lower-level languages such as C. Here is a quick look at their main properties. Python lists are:

Ordered collections of arbitrary objects

From a functional view, lists are just places to collect other objects so you can treat them as groups. Lists also maintain a left-to-right positional ordering among the items they contain (i.e., they are sequences).

Accessed by offset

Just as with strings, you can fetch a component object out of a list by indexing the list on the object’s offset. Because items in lists are ...