--Originally published at Carolina's Blog Site
In Python, everything is a value==object. Values are classified into classes or types of data. There are 5 standard types of data:
- Numbers
- Strings
- Lists
- Tuples
- Dictionaries
Numbers: The 2 most common types of number are the integer and the float (decimal points), but there’s also long (long integers) and complex (complex numbers)
Strings are a collection of characters stringed together that can be used to store like, anything. To enter a string, use “” or ”. Btw, adding strings together is called concatenation. You can refer to a certain part of a string by using the index operator to get one character, e.g. [1], or by slicing it to get groups of characters, e.g. [1:3].
Lists are used to store an indexed list of items. They are created using [] and separating items with ,,,. They are mutable. The certain item in the list can be accessed by using its index in square brackets.
- To check if an item is in a list, use the in operator, which returns True if the item is in the list, and False if it is not.
- Append method adds an item to the end of an existing list, e.g. nums.append(4).
- Len function to get the number of items in a list, e.g. print (len(nums)).
- The insert method allows you to insert a new item at any position in the list.
- The index method finds the first occurrence of a list item and returns its index.
- max(list): Returns the list item with the maximum value.
- min(list): Returns the list item with minimum value.
- list.count(obj): Returns a count of how many times an item occurs in a list.
- list.remove(obj): Removes an object from a list.
- list.reverse(): Reverses objects in a list.
Tuples are lists,
Dictionaries: are the relation between a key and a value given to that key, and the’re enclosed by {}. To retrieve the value of the key, use []. E.g.
>>>my_dct= {‘ramen’: 5, ‘pasta’: 3}
>>>my_dct [‘pasta’]
3
