Question

I am practicing slicing, and I want to run a program that prints a name backwards.

Mainly, I want to know how to access the last item in the sequence.

I wrote the following:

name = raw_input("Enter Your Name: ")
backname = ???

print backname

Is this a sound approach? Obviously, the ??? is not a part of my syntax, just asking what should go there.

Answer 1

To access the last item in a sequence, use:

print name[-1]

This is the same as:

print name[len(name) - 1]

Reversing a sequence has a common idiom in Python:

backname = name[::-1]

The Good primer for Python slice notation question has more complete information.