How to delete last item in list?

Question

I have this program that calculates the time taken to answer a specific question, and quits out of the while loop when answer is incorrect, but i want to delete the last calcula

Answer 1

just simply use list.pop() now if you want it the other way use : list.popleft()

Answer 2

If you do a lot with timing, I can recommend this little (20 line) context manager:

• https://github.com/brouberol/timer-context-manager

You code could look like this then:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# coding: utf-8

from timer import Timer

if __name__ == '__main__':
    a, record = None, []
    while not a == '':
        with Timer() as t: # everything in the block will be timed
            a = input('Type: ')
        record.append(t.elapsed_s)
    # drop the last item (makes a copy of the list):
    record = record[:-1] 
    # or just delete it:
    # del record[-1]

---

Just for reference, here's the content of the Timer context manager in full:

from timeit import default_timer

class Timer(object):
    """ A timer as a context manager. """

    def __init__(self):
        self.timer = default_timer
        # measures wall clock time, not CPU time!
        # On Unix systems, it corresponds to time.time
        # On Windows systems, it corresponds to time.clock

    def __enter__(self):
        self.start = self.timer() # measure start time
        return self

    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback):
        self.end = self.timer() # measure end time
        self.elapsed_s = self.end - self.start # elapsed time, in seconds
        self.elapsed_ms = self.elapsed_s * 1000  # elapsed time, in milliseconds

Answer 3

you should use this

del record[-1]

The problem with

record = record[:-1]

Is that it makes a copy of the list every time you remove an item, so isn't very efficient

Answer 4

If you have a list of lists (tracked_output_sheet in my case), where you want to delete last element from each list, you can use the following code:

interim = []
for x in tracked_output_sheet:interim.append(x[:-1])
tracked_output_sheet= interim

Answer 5

list.pop() removes and returns the last element of the list.

Answer 6

You need:

record = record[:-1]

before the for loop.

This will set record to the current record list but without the last item. You may, depending on your needs, want to ensure the list isn't empty before doing this.