Practice Python

Followers and friends, I apologize for not posting this week. Sometimes life throws you lemons (or appendicitis) and you need to make lemonade (or spend a few nights in the hospital and have emergency surgery). I am now recovering, and this post will be up for a week and a half. Happy hacking!

Exercise

Take a list, say for example this one:

a = [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89]

and write a program that prints out all the elements of the list that are less than 5.

Extras:

Instead of printing the elements one by one, make a new list that has all the elements less than 5 from this list in it and print out this new list.

Write this in one line of Python.

Ask the user for a number and return a list that contains only elements from the original list a that are smaller than that number given by the user.

Discussion

This week's topics:

Lists

More conditionals (if statements)

Lists

This week's exercise hits on a topic critical for all types and styles of programming: lists. Lists are basically an ordered way of grouping things (called elements) - the cool thing about lists in Python is that you can have a list that contains objects of multiple types. Your list can mix between strings, integers, objects, other lists, what have you.
The way to construct an empty list is just to do

x = []

And your variable x now holds an empty list. To add things to this list, just "append" them to the list. Like so:

x = []

x.append(3)

Your list x now looks like [3].

In Python, lists are also iterables, which means you can loop through them with a for loop in a convenient way. (If you come from other languages like C++ or Java you are most likely used to using a counter to loop through indices of a list - in Python you can actually loop through the elements.) I will let the code speak for itself:

my_list = [1, 3, "Michele", [5, 6, 7]]
for element in my_list:
    print element

Will yield the result:

1 
3
"Michele"
[5, 6, 7]

There are many other properties of lists, but for the basic exercise all you should need is this for loop property. Future weeks will address other properties of lists.
For more information about lists in Python, check out these resources:

The official Python documentation on lists

Tutorialspoint on Python lists

Someone else's blog post about lists

More Conditionals

The nice thing about conditionals is that they follow logical operations. They can also be used to test equality. Let's do a small example. Let's say I want to make a piece of code that converts from a numerical grade (1-100) to a letter grade (A, B, C, D, F). The code would look like this:

grade = input("Enter your grade: ")
if grade >= 90:
    print("A")
elif grade >= 80:
    print("B")
elif grade >= 70:
    print("C")
elif grade >= 65:
    print("D")
else:
    print("F")

What happens if grade is 50? All the conditions are false, so "F" gets printed on the screen. But what if grade is 95? Then all the conditions are true and everything gets printed, right? Nope! What happens is the program goes line by line. The first condition (grade >= 90) is satisfied, so the program enters into the code inside the if statement, executing print("A"). Once code inside a conditional has been executed, the rest of the conditions are skipped and none of the other conditionals are checked.

Forgot how to submit exercises?