Getting the last element of a list

python list indexing
Janusz picture Janusz · May 30, 2009 · Viewed 2.3M times · Source

In Python, how do you get the last element of a list?

Answer

Sasha Chedygov picture Sasha Chedygov · May 30, 2009

some_list[-1] is the shortest and most Pythonic.

In fact, you can do much more with this syntax. The some_list[-n] syntax gets the nth-to-last element. So some_list[-1] gets the last element, some_list[-2] gets the second to last, etc, all the way down to some_list[-len(some_list)], which gives you the first element.

You can also set list elements in this way. For instance:

>>> some_list = [1, 2, 3]
>>> some_list[-1] = 5 # Set the last element
>>> some_list[-2] = 3 # Set the second to last element
>>> some_list
[1, 3, 5]

Note that getting a list item by index will raise an IndexError if the expected item doesn't exist. This means that some_list[-1] will raise an exception if some_list is empty, because an empty list can't have a last element.

Related questions

Finding the index of an item in a list

Given a list ["foo", "bar", "baz"] and an item in the list "bar", how do I get its index (1) in Python?

Read More
Explicitly select items from a list or tuple

I have the following Python list (can also be a tuple): myList = ['foo', 'bar', 'baz', 'quux'] I can say >>> myList[0:3] ['foo', 'bar', 'baz'] >>> myList[::2] ['foo', 'baz'] >>> myList[1::2] ['bar', 'quux'] How do …

Read More
Access multiple elements of list knowing their index

I need to choose some elements from the given list, knowing their index. Let say I would like to create a new list, which contains element with index 1, 2, 5, from given list [-2, 1, 5, 3, 8, 5, 6]. What I did is: a = [-2,1,5,3,8,5,6] b = [1,2,5] c = [ …

Read More