Slicing allows you to extract a specific range of elements from an array, list, string, or tuple. The syntax for slicing is [start:stop:step], where start
is the starting index of the range,stop
is the ending index, and step
is the number of elements to skip between each element in the range. The default values for start
is 0, stop
is the length of the array, and step
is 1. You can also use negative values for start
and stop
to count from the end of the array instead of the beginning.
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You can slice any array-like object, such as a list, tuple, or string. For example:
my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
my_tuple = (6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
my_string = "abcdef"
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The
start
andstop
indices determine the range of elements that will be included in the slice. These indices are inclusive forstart
and exclusive forstop
. For example:-
my_list[1:3]
returns[2, 3]
-
my_tuple[:3]
returns(6, 7, 8)
-
my_string[2:]
returns"cdef"
-
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The
step
value determines the interval between elements that will be included in the slice. Ifstep
is greater than 1, it will skip over elements. Ifstep
is negative, it will include elements in reverse order. For example:-
my_list[::2]
returns[1, 3, 5]
-
my_tuple[::-1]
returns(10, 9, 8, 7, 6)
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my_string[3:0:-1]
returns"dca"
-
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If “start” or “stop” are negative, they will be counted from the end of the array. For example:
-
my_list[-2:]
returns[4, 5]
-
my_tuple[:-3]
returns(6, 7)
-
my_string[-3:-1]
returns"de"
-
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If there are fewer elements in the array than requested in the slice, Python will return an empty list or string instead of an error. This is a convenient feature, but it’s important to be aware of it in case you want to handle such cases differently.
Example