Often when we’re dealing with data in Python, we may need to reverse a list. Perhaps you’re dealing with a timeline that needs to be displayed in chronological order, or maybe you merely just want to switch everything up for other reasons.
Whatever the case may be, Python allows us to easily reverse a list. This tutorial will guide you on how you can reverse a list using a for loop in Python.
Step 1: Preparation
Before we can reverse a list we first need a list to work with. Here’s how we will create our list:
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my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] print(my_list) |
Output
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Step 2: Create an Empty List
To reverse our list, we’re going to create a new, empty list. This will serve as our reversed list.
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rev_list = [] |
Step 3: Populate Reversed List
Next, we’re going to use a for loop to iterate over our initial list in reverse order. We can achieve this using Python’s built-in reversed function, which returns a reverse iterator. The items from my_list will then be appended to rev_list one by one.
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for item in reversed(my_list): rev_list.append(item) print(rev_list) |
Output
[5, 4, 3, 2, 1]
The Full Code
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my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] print(my_list) rev_list = [] for item in reversed(my_list): rev_list.append(item) print(rev_list) |
Conclusion
As we can see, reversing a list with a for loop in Python is a fairly straightforward process. First, we create an empty list, then use our for loop to iterate over the original list in reverse, appending each item to our empty list.
Remember, Python’s built-in features like the reversed function can often aid in accomplishing these sorts of tasks. Happy programming!