Did you know about the range function?

Key Takeaways

range. So, what range will do is generate a range of numbers starting at some value, stopping at some value, and stepping by some value. Now, by default, when you only pass one value here to the range function, this acts as the stop. That means it's going to go up to, but not include this number, and it's going to start at one and step by one, which means go up by one each time. So, if I run the code here, you can see that this gives us the values zero through nine, again because we go to the stopping point, but we do not include it. Now, if I have a second value here, something like two and then 10, this will act as the start value and this will act as the stop value. And now, when I run this, you see that we will simply start at two, we will go up to 10, but not include it. If I decide to add a third value here, something like two, this will act as the step value and this will be the increment that we will go up by each time. So, if I run this here, we get 2 4 6 8. Now, this is quite useful and we can do this in many different kind of ways, generate a lot of different sequences of numbers. For example, I can change this to a negative two and I can swap these values around and go maybe 10, and maybe we're actually going to go to something like negative 10. And now, this will give us a negative range where we start at 10 and we subtract two each time until we hit the stopping value of negative 10, which we do not include. Very useful for for loops, but also if you convert this range into a list, then you can simply use it as a list of values. One thing to note, if you print out range itself, which we can do here, you'll see that we actually get a range object. That's because range returns to us something known as an iterator. The point is, if you want to actually get an entire list of values, you do need to manually convert this to a list. Okay? So, to do that, we just write the list function around range, and then as you saw before, it gives us a list of values rather than this range object, which again is an iterator.