Efficient way to rotate a list in python

Question

What is the most efficient way to rotate a list in python? Right now I have something like this:

>>> def rotate(l, n):
...     return l[n:] + l[:n]         


        

Answer 1

For a list X = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'] and a desired shift value of shift less than list length, we can define the function list_shift() as below

def list_shift(my_list, shift):
    assert shift < len(my_list)
    return my_list[shift:] + my_list[:shift]

Examples,

list_shift(X,1) returns ['b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'a'] list_shift(X,3) returns ['d', 'e', 'f', 'a', 'b', 'c']