List Values¶

There are several ways to create a new list. The simplest is to enclose the elements in square brackets ( [ and ]).

[10, 20, 30, 40]
["spam", "bungee", "swallow"]

The first example is a list of four integers. The second is a list of three strings. As we said above, the elements of a list don’t have to be the same type. The following list contains a string, a float, an integer, and another list.

["hello", 2.0, 5, [10, 20]]

A list within another list is said to be nested and the inner list is often called a sublist. Finally, there is a special list that contains no elements. It is called the empty list and is denoted [].

As you would expect, we can also assign list values to variables and pass lists as parameters to functions.

vocabulary = ["iteration", "selection", "control"]
numbers = [17, 123]
empty = []
mixedlist = ["hello", 2.0, 5*2, [10, 20]]

print(numbers)
print(mixedlist)
newlist = [ numbers, vocabulary ]
print(newlist)

(chp09_01)

Check your understanding

list-2-1: A list can contain only integer items.