How do I get the last element of a list?
Which way is preferred?
alist[-1] alist[len(alist) - 1]
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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 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’t exist. This means that some_list[-1]
will raise an exception if some_list
is empty, because an empty list can’t have a last element.