How to make matrices in Python?

Question

I\'ve googled it and searched StackOverflow and YouTube.. I just can\'t get matrices in Python to click in my head. Can someone please help me? I\'m just trying to create a

Answer 1

The answer to your question depends on what your learning goals are. If you are trying to get matrices to "click" so you can use them later, I would suggest looking at a Numpy array instead of a list of lists. This will let you slice out rows and columns and subsets easily. Just try to get a column from a list of lists and you will be frustrated.

Using a list of lists as a matrix...

Let's take your list of lists for example:

L = [list("ABCDE") for i in range(5)]

It is easy to get sub-elements for any row:

>>> L[1][0:3]
['A', 'B', 'C']

Or an entire row:

>>> L[1][:]
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E']

But try to flip that around to get the same elements in column format, and it won't work...

>>> L[0:3][1]
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E']

>>> L[:][1]
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E']

You would have to use something like list comprehension to get all the 1th elements....

>>> [x[1] for x in L]
['B', 'B', 'B', 'B', 'B']

Enter matrices

If you use an array instead, you will get the slicing and indexing that you expect from MATLAB or R, (or most other languages, for that matter):

>>> import numpy as np
>>> Y = np.array(list("ABCDE"*5)).reshape(5,5)
>>> print Y
[['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']
 ['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']
 ['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']
 ['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']
 ['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']]
>>> print Y.transpose()
[['A' 'A' 'A' 'A' 'A']
 ['B' 'B' 'B' 'B' 'B']
 ['C' 'C' 'C' 'C' 'C']
 ['D' 'D' 'D' 'D' 'D']
 ['E' 'E' 'E' 'E' 'E']]

Grab row 1 (as with lists):

>>> Y[1,:]
array(['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'], 
      dtype='|S1')

Grab column 1 (new!):

>>> Y[:,1]
array(['B', 'B', 'B', 'B', 'B'], 
      dtype='|S1')

So now to generate your printed matrix:

for mycol in Y.transpose():
    print " ".join(mycol)


A A A A A
B B B B B
C C C C C
D D D D D
E E E E E