Question

I am a complete newbie to python and attempting to pass an array as an argument to a python function that declares a list/array as the parameter.

I am sure I am declaring it wrong,

here goes:

def dosomething(listparam):
         #do something here
dosomething(listargument)

Clearly this is not working, what am I doing wrong?

Thanks

Answer 1

What you have is on the right track.

def dosomething( thelist ):
    for element in thelist:
        print element

dosomething( ['1','2','3'] )
alist = ['red','green','blue']
dosomething( alist )  

Produces the output:

1
2
3
red
green
blue

A couple of things to note given your comment above: unlike in C-family languages, you often don’t need to bother with tracking the index while iterating over a list, unless the index itself is important. If you really do need the index, though, you can use enumerate(list) to get index,element pairs, rather than doing the x in range(len(thelist)) dance.