Python List Tutorial: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

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In this tutorial, we’ll cover the basics of working with lists in Python. Lists are a very common data structure in Python and are used to store collections of items.

Creating a list

To create a list in Python, you simply enclose a comma-separated sequence of items in square brackets. For example:

fruits = ["apple", "banana", "cherry"]

This creates a list called fruits that contains three strings: "apple", "banana", and "cherry".

Accessing list items

You can access individual items in a list using their index. The index of the first item in a list is 0, and the index of the last item is the length of the list minus 1. For example:

fruits = ["apple", "banana", "cherry"]
print(fruits[0])  # prints "apple"
print(fruits[1])  # prints "banana"
print(fruits[2])  # prints "cherry"

You can also use negative indices to access items from the end of the list. For example:

fruits = ["apple", "banana", "cherry"]
print(fruits[-1])  # prints "cherry"
print(fruits[-2])  # prints "banana"
print(fruits[-3])  # prints "apple"