How to modify list entries during for loop?

Question

Now I know that it is not safe to modify the list during an iterative looping. However, suppose I have a list of strings, and I want to strip the strings themselves. Does re

Answer 1

Modifying each element while iterating a list is fine, as long as you do not change add/remove elements to list.

You can use list comprehension:

l = ['a', ' list', 'of ', ' string ']
l = [item.strip() for item in l]

or just do the C-style for loop:

for index, item in enumerate(l):
    l[index] = item.strip()

Answer 2

In short, to do modification on the list while iterating the same list.

list[:] = ["Modify the list" for each_element in list "Condition Check"]

example:

list[:] = [list.remove(each_element) for each_element in list if each_element in ["data1", "data2"]]

Answer 3

No you wouldn't alter the "content" of the list, if you could mutate strings that way. But in Python they are not mutable. Any string operation returns a new string.

If you had a list of objects you knew were mutable, you could do this as long as you don't change the actual contents of the list.

Thus you will need to do a map of some sort. If you use a generator expression it [the operation] will be done as you iterate and you will save memory.

Answer 4

One more for loop variant, looks cleaner to me than one with enumerate():

for idx in range(len(list)):
    list[idx]=... # set a new value
    # some other code which doesn't let you use a list comprehension

Answer 5

It is not clear from your question what the criteria for deciding what strings to remove is, but if you have or can make a list of the strings that you want to remove , you could do the following:

my_strings = ['a','b','c','d','e']
undesirable_strings = ['b','d']
for undesirable_string in undesirable_strings:
    for i in range(my_strings.count(undesirable_string)):
        my_strings.remove(undesirable_string)

which changes my_strings to ['a', 'c', 'e']

Answer 6

You can do something like this:

a = [1,2,3,4,5]
b = [i**2 for i in a]

It's called a list comprehension, to make it easier for you to loop inside a list.