Finding the average of a list

Question

I have to find the average of a list in Python. This is my code so far

l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
print reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, l)

Answer 1

as a beginner, I just coded this:

L = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]

total = 0

def average(numbers):
    total = sum(numbers)
    total = float(total)
    return total / len(numbers)

print average(L)

Answer 2

On Python 3.4+ you can use statistics.mean()

l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]

import statistics
statistics.mean(l)  # 20.11111111111111

On older versions of Python you can do

sum(l) / len(l)

On Python 2 you need to convert len to a float to get float division

sum(l) / float(len(l))

There is no need to use reduce. It is much slower and was removed in Python 3.

Answer 3

Instead of casting to float, you can add 0.0 to the sum:

def avg(l):
    return sum(l, 0.0) / len(l)

Answer 4

Combining a couple of the above answers, I've come up with the following which works with reduce and doesn't assume you have L available inside the reducing function:

from operator import truediv

L = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]

def sum_and_count(x, y):
    try:
        return (x[0] + y, x[1] + 1)
    except TypeError:
        return (x + y, 2)

truediv(*reduce(sum_and_count, L))

# prints 
20.11111111111111

Answer 5

Find the average in list By using the following PYTHON code:

l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
print(sum(l)//len(l))

try this it easy.

Answer 6

print reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, l)/(len(l)*1.0)

or like posted previously

sum(l)/(len(l)*1.0)

The 1.0 is to make sure you get a floating point division