Slice assignment

suggest change

Another neat feature using slices is slice assignment. Python allows you to assign new slices to replace old slices of a list in a single operation.

This means that if you have a list, you can replace multiple members in a single assignment:

lst = [1, 2, 3]
lst[1:3] = [4, 5]
print(lst) # Out: [1, 4, 5]

The assignment shouldn’t match in size as well, so if you wanted to replace an old slice with a new slice that is different in size, you could:

lst = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
lst[1:4] = [6]
print(lst) # Out: [1, 6, 5]

It’s also possible to use the known slicing syntax to do things like replacing the entire list:

lst = [1, 2, 3]
lst[:] = [4, 5, 6]
print(lst) # Out: [4, 5, 6]

Or just the last two members:

lst = [1, 2, 3]
lst[-2:] = [4, 5, 6]
print(lst) # Out: [1, 4, 5, 6]

Feedback about page:

Feedback:
Optional: your email if you want me to get back to you:


Indexing and Slicing:
* Slice assignment

Table Of Contents
2 Filter
3 List
7 Loops
19 Indexing and Slicing
22 Reduce
27 Classes
31 Set
42 Tuple
45 Enum
62 Sockets
89 urllib
92 Idioms
104 Stack
105 Profiling
109 Logging
111 os module
118 Mixins
120 ArcPy
126 Arrays
132 2to3 tool
135 Unicode
138 Neo4j
140 Curses
141 Templates
145 heapq
146 tkinter
154 Audio
155 pyglet
157 ijson
160 Flask
161 Groupby
163 pygame
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
185 pyaudio
186 shelve