Question

I find it annoying that I can’t clear a list. In this example:

a = [] a.append(1) a.append(2)  a = [] 

The second time I initialize a to a blank list, it creates a new instance of a list, which is in a different place in memory, so I can’t use it to reference the first, not to mention it’s inefficient.

The only way I can see of retaining the same pointer is doing something like the following:

for i in range(len(a)):     a.pop() 

This seems pretty long-winded though, is there a better way of solving this?

Answer 1

You are looking for:

del L[:]