Element at the last index in the provided range will not be returned. For example: sequence will return elements from 'A' to 'D' and not up to 'E'. This operation is referred to as slicing. The above statement will return values starting at index si up to but NOT including the element at index ei. We can access multiple elements from the sequence using the syntax in the following manner: sequence The above statement will return the element from sequence at index i. The syntax for accessing a single element is as follows: sequence It takes index of an element and returns the element itself. Almost all python data structures have an index to position and locate the element.Įlements within the sequence can be accessed using the square brackets. Whenever a new character is appended to this sequence, it will be appended at the end and will be assigned the next index value (in the above example, the new index will be 10 for the new character). Notice how the index increases in chronological order by one unit at each step. In the above sequence, the character A is at index 0, B at 1, C at 2, and so on. These increase successively by 1 as can be seen below. The position assigned to each character is a sequence of integers beginning with 0 up to the last character. Similarly, python data structures store sequences of objects (floats, integers, strings, etc.).Ĭonsider a sequence of 10 characters ranging from A to J where we assign a unique position to each literal in a sequence. Indexing and SlicingĪ string can be thought of as a sequence of characters. We will cover the following topics in this python data structures tutorial:īefore we dive into the world of python data structures, let us have a look at the concept of indexing and slicing which is applicable to all data structures in Python. This blog article is an excerpt from the Python Basics Handbook created for the simple purpose of making the reader understand the beauty and simplicity of the Python language.

Arrays can be considered a basic form of python data structures while files are more advanced to store complex data. Broadly speaking, python data structures are divided into array, list and file. Unlike a variable, they don't just store a value, rather a collection of values in various formats.

Like a variable, python data structures are also used to store a value. Python has various built-in data structures such as tuples, lists, dictionaries, and sets.

Python object and data structure basics