Mastering Python Scripting for System Administrators

Indexing, slicing, and matrices

List indices work the same way as string indices. Values can be accessed using index. If you try to read or write an element that does not exist, you get IndexError. If an index has a negative value, it counts backward from the end of the list.

Now, we will create a list named cities and we will see the index operations:

cities = ['Mumbai', 'Bangalore', 'Chennai', 'Pune']

Description	Expression	Results
Index start at zero	cities[2]	'Chennai'
Slicing: getting sections	cities[1:]	['Bangalore', 'Chennai', 'Pune']
Negative: count from the right	cities[-3]	'Bangalore'