Python Lists

Lists are used to store zero or more things in a variable. One can think of the variable as, say, a grocery bag which holds "things", which for a grocery bag would be groceries. The examples below will use this idea of a groceries. A list is a comma delimited collection of items placed inside brackets []. A list can be created with items already in it:

groceries = ['apples', 'oranges', 'paper towels']

Sometimes you don't know right away what to put in the list, so the variable can be initialized with an empty list:

groceries = []

Lists can have more than one of the same item:

groceries = ['apples', 'oranges', 'apples']

This is different from dictionaries, where the dictionary key is always unique.

The items in a list do not all have to be of the same type. For example, this is a perfectly valid list:

listOfDifferentTypes = ['One', 1, True]