What will we cover in this tutorial?
- Understand the challenge with deleting elements while iterating over a Python list.
- How to delete element from a Python list while iterating over it.
Step 1: What happens when you just delete elements from a Python list while iterating over it?
Let’s first try this simple example to understand the challenge of deleting element in a Python list while iterating over it.
a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
for e in a:
a.remove(e)
print(a)
Now, looking at this piece of code, it would seem to be intended to delete all elements. But that is not happening. See, the output is.
[1, 3, 5, 7, 9]
Seems like every second element is deleted. Right?
Let’s try to understand that. When we enter the the loop we see the following view.
for e (= 0, first element) in a (= [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]):
a.remove(e)
Then the first element is removed on the second line, then the view is.
for e (= 0, first element) in a (= [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]):
a.remove(e) (a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9])
Going into the second iteration it looks like this.
for e (= 2, second element) in a (= [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]):
a.remove(e)
Hence, we see that the iterator takes the second element, which now is the number 2.
This explains why the every second number is deleted from the list.
Step 2: What if we use index instead
Good idea. Let’s see what happens.
a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
for i, e in enumerate(a):
a.pop(i)
print(a)
Which results in the same.
[1, 3, 5, 7, 9]
What if we iterate directly over the index by using the length of the list.
a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
for i in range(len(a)):
a.pop(i)
print(a)
Oh, no.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "main.py", line 3, in <module>
a.pop(i)
IndexError: pop index out of range
I get it. It is because the len(a) is invoked in the first iteration and results to 10. Then when we reach i = 5, we have already pop’ed 5 elements and have only 5 elements left. Hence, out of bound.
Not convinced?
a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
for i in range(len(a)):
print(i, len(a), a)
a.pop(i)
print(a)
Resulting to.
0 10 [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
1 9 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
2 8 [1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
3 7 [1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
4 6 [1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9]
5 5 [1, 3, 5, 7, 9]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "main.py", line 4, in <module>
a.pop(i)
IndexError: pop index out of range
But what to do?
Step 3: How to delete elements while iterating over a list
The problem we want to solve is not to delete all the element. It is to delete entries based on their values or some conditions, where we need to interpret the values of the elements.
How can we do that?
By using list comprehension or by making a copy. Or is it the same, as list comprehension is creating a new copy, right?
Okay, one step at the time. Just see the following example.
a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
a = [i for i in a if i % 2 == 0]
print(a)
Resulting in a copy of the the original list with only the even elements.
[0, 2, 4, 6, 8]
To see it is a copy you can evaluate the following code.
a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
b = a
a = [i for i in a if i % 2 == 0]
print(a)
print(b)
Resulting in the following, where you see the variable a get’s a new copy of it and the variable b refers to the original (and unmodified version).
[0, 2, 4, 6, 8]
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
Hence, the effect of the list comprehension construction above is as the following code shows.
a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
# a = [i for i in a if i % 2 == 0]
c = []
for i in a:
if i % 2 == 0:
c.append(i)
a = c
print(a)
Getting the what you want.
[0, 2, 4, 6, 8]
Next steps
You can make the criteria more advanced by making the criteria by a function call.
def criteria(v):
# some advanced code that returns True of False
a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
a = [i for i in a if criteria(i)]
And if you want to keep a state of all previous criteria, then you can even use an Object to keep that stored.
class State:
# ...
def criteria(self, v):
# ...
s = State()
a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
a = [i for i in a if s.criteria(i)]
Also, check out this tutorial that makes some observations on performance on list comprehensions.
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