Question

I am studying the Learn Python The Hard Way PDF. On page 82 i come across this question.

• Could you have avoided that for-loop entirely on line 23 and just assigned range(0,6) directly to elements?

Given the code:

# we can also build lists, first start with an empty one
elements = []

# then use the range function to do 0 to 20 counts
for i in range(0, 6):
    print "Adding %d to the list." % i    # line 23
    # append is a function that lists understand
    elements.append(i)

# now we can print them out too
for i in elements:
    print "Element was: %d" % i

It seems this is not possible unless i use the map function? Am i correct?

Answer 1

In python 2.x, range returns a list. In 3.x, it returns an iterable range object. You can always use list(range(...)) to get a list.

However, for x in y does not require y to be a list, just an iterable (such as xrange(2.x only), range, list, str, …)