a looping cheatsheet for python

The following post is inspired by Trey Hunner’s great post on looping with indexes in Python.

What’s below:

1. Standard loop through an iterable
2. Loop with range
3. Loop with enumerate
4. Loop with zip

Standard For In Loop

Python’s looping reads almost like English. If we want to see every character in a string or every number in a range, we can do something as simple as a for in:

string = "ABCDEFG"
nums = range(10)

for c in string:
  print(c)

for num in nums:
  print(num)

Loop With Range

Ranges start to be interesting if we want to loop over lists, or create lists from other iterables.

names=["Stephen","Kate","Finn","Magpie"]
for i in range(len(names)):
  print(names[i])

Here i is the index of the list names, which is then used to access the value in the print statement.

Of course, in Python, this isn’t necessary:

names=["Stephen","Kate","Finn","Magpie"]
for name in range(names):
  print(name)

That’s some sweet syntactic sugar right there!

Loop With Enumerate

Learning about Python’s enumerate package is when I started to get excited! Sometimes, you want access to the actual index.

We could do the trick above where we convert the iterable with the len() and then use both the index and the value, but we don’t have to.

Python’s enumerate, a built-in function:

names=["Stephen","Kate","Finn","Magpie"]
for index, name in enumerate(names):
  print(f"{name} is in position {index}")

Loop With Zip

So, with enumerate we can access both the index and the value. That means that we could, in theory map it to a separate list.

For example:

names=["Stephen","Kate","Finn","Magpie"]
ages=["30","???","2.5","0"]
for index, name in enumerate(names):
  print(f"{name} is {ages[index]} years old.")

This works, but it’s a little awkward.

We can use Python’s zip function for this:

names=["Stephen","Kate","Finn","Magpie"]
ages=["30","???","2.5","0"]
for name, age in zip(names, ages):
  print(f"{name} is {age} years old.")