Create an empty list in python with certain size

Question

I want to create an empty list (or whatever is the best way) that can hold 10 elements.

After that I want to assign values in that list, for example this is supposed to display 0 to 9:

s1 = list();
for i in range(0,9):
   s1[i] = i

print  s1

But when I run this code, it generates an error or in another case it just displays [] (empty).

Can someone explain why?

Answer 1

You cannot assign to a list like lst[i] = something, unless the list already is initialized with at least i+1 elements. You need to use append to add elements to the end of the list. lst.append(something).

(You could use the assignment notation if you were using a dictionary).

Creating an empty list:

>>> l = [None] * 10
>>> l
[None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None]

Assigning a value to an existing element of the above list:

>>> l[1] = 5
>>> l
[None, 5, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None]

Keep in mind that something like l[15] = 5 would still fail, as our list has only 10 elements.

range(x) creates a list from [0, 1, 2, ... x-1]

# 2.X only. Use list(range(10)) in 3.X.
>>> l = range(10)
>>> l
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Using a function to create a list:

>>> def display():
...     s1 = []
...     for i in range(9): # This is just to tell you how to create a list.
...         s1.append(i)
...     return s1
... 
>>> print display()
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

List comprehension (Using the squares because for range you don't need to do all this, you can just return range(0,9) ):

>>> def display():
...     return [x**2 for x in range(9)]
... 
>>> print display()
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64]