Question

I want to create a list that will contain the last 5 values entered into it.

Here is an example:

>>> l = []
>>> l.append('apple')
>>> l.append('orange')
>>> l.append('grape')
>>> l.append('banana')
>>> l.append('mango')
>>> print(l)
['apple', 'orange', 'grape', 'banana', 'mango']
>>> l.append('kiwi')
>>> print(l)  # only 5 items in list
['orange', 'grape', 'banana', 'mango', 'kiwi']

So, in Python, is there any way to achieve what is demonstrated above? The variable does not need to be a list, I just used it as an example.

Answer 1

You might want to use a collections.deque object with the maxlen constructor argument instead:

>>> l = collections.deque(maxlen=5)
>>> l.append('apple')
>>> l.append('orange')
>>> l.append('grape')
>>> l.append('banana')
>>> l.append('mango')
>>> print(l)
deque(['apple', 'orange', 'grape', 'banana', 'mango'], maxlen=5)
>>> l.append('kiwi')
>>> print(l)  # only 5 items in list
deque(['orange', 'grape', 'banana', 'mango', 'kiwi'], maxlen=5)