How do I get the last element of a list?

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How do I get the last element of a list? Which way is preferred? Answer some_list[-1] is the shortest and most Pythonic. In fact, you can do much more with this syntax. The some_list[-n] syntax gets the nth-to-last element. So some_list[-1] gets the last element, some_list[-2] gets the second to last, etc, all the way down to some_list[-len(some_list)], which gives

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some_list[-1] is the shortest and most Pythonic.In fact, you can do much more with this syntax. The some_list[-n] syntax gets the nth-to-last element. So some_list[-1] gets the last element, some_list[-2] gets the second to last, etc, all the way down to some_list[-len(some_list)], which gives you the first element.You can also set list elements in this way. For instance:>>> some_list = [1, 2, 3]>>> some_list[-1] = 5 # Set the last element>>> some_list[-2] = 3 # Set the second to last element>>> some_list[1, 3, 5]Note that getting a list item by index will raise an IndexError if the expected item doesn&#8217;t exist. This means that some_list[-1] will raise an exception if some_list is empty, because an empty list can&#8217;t have a last element.

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