Question

I want to limit the size of a list in python 2.7 I have been trying to do it with a while loop but it doesn’t work

l=[]
i=raw_input()//this is the size of the list
count=0
while count<i:
    l.append(raw_input())
    count=count+1

The thing is that it does not finish the loop. I think this problem has an easy answer but I can’t find it.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I think the problem is here:

i=raw_input()//this is the size of the list

raw_input() returns a string, not an integer, so comparisons between i and count don’t make sense. [In Python 3, you’d get the error message TypeError: unorderable types: int() < str(), which would have made things clear.] If you convert i to an int, though:

i = int(raw_input())

it should do what you expect. (We’ll ignore error handling etc. and possibly converting what you’re adding to l if you need to.)

Note though that it would be more Pythonic to write something like

for term_i in range(num_terms):
    s = raw_input()
    l.append(s)

Most of the time you shouldn’t need to manually keep track of indices by “+1”, so if you find yourself doing it there’s probably a better way.