Learning Objectives

Students will be able to:

• Use lists, tuples as containers for data
• Use list comprehensions to create lists
• Use a range and a for statement to loop through a range of integers
• Create subsets of a sequence using the slice operator

General Purpose Containers

As you know by now, applications frequently need to maintain collections of data within a container data type.

<aside> 🧠 What did we use in JS to hold collections of data?

</aside>

In this lesson, we're going to review the following Python built-in types commonly used as containers:

1. lists
2. tuples

Lists

Purpose

• Lists are to Python as arrays are to JS.
• A list provides a container for zero or more items (elements).
• Lists can contain items of different types, including dictionaries and nested lists.
• List have a class (type) of list.

Basic Syntax

Like arrays in JS, a list is created with a set of square brackets:

colors = ['red', 'green', 'blue']

The number of items in a list is returned using the built-in len() function:

len(colors)
# > 3