Lists

Lists are generic containers that can store heterogeneous data in Python. In this example, you'll store data about a person in a list. The list will contain the following data (in that order):

• First name
• Last name
• Sex
• Employment status
• Number of twitter followers

Recall that you can use square brackets to extract values out of a list. Since Python is a 0-indexed language, the first element has an index of 0. If you want to extract multiple consecutive values, you can use the colon (:). Python is a left-inclusive, right-exclusive language, meaning when specifying a range, the starting value will be included, but the ending value will not be included. So to extract the first four values of the list x, you can use:

x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
print(x[0:4])

[1, 2, 3, 4]

You can also specify negative indices to subset elements. When you do this, remember to start counting from the end of the list. To extract the last element from a list, you can use:

print(x[-1])
5