In Python, a list is an ordered sequence of items, where each item has an index that identifies it in the list. The index of the first element of a list is 0 and the index of the last element is length of the list minus 1. To access the last element of a Python list, there are several solutions.
The first solution is to use the index -1 to access the last element of the list. For example, if we have a list named my_list, we can access the last item with the following statement:
last_element = my_list[-1]
This statement returns the last element of the my_list list, regardless of its length.
Another solution is to use the pop() method of the list, which removes and returns the last element of the list. For example:
my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
last_element = my_list.pop()
In this case, the variable last_element will contain the value of the last element of the list my_list, which will also be removed from the list itself.
Finally, if we just want to access the last element without removing it from the list, we can use the len() function to calculate the length of the list and then use the index of the last element. For example:
my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
last_element = my_list[len(my_list)-1]
This statement returns the last element of the list my_list, using the index calculated as the length of the list minus 1.
Another solution to access the last element of a Python list is to use slicing. Slicing allows us to select a portion of the list using a range of indices.
To select only the last element of the list, we can use slicing with index -1 as in this example:
my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
last_element = my_list[-1:]
In this case, the last_element variable will contain a new list containing only the last element of the my_list list. However, since this method returns a list, we need to access the actual element using index 0 as follows:
last_element = my_list[-1:][0]
Alternatively, we can use slicing with the range [length of list - 1: length of list], like in this example:
my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
last_element = my_list[len(my_list)-1:]
In this case, the last_element variable will contain a new list containing only the last element of the my_list list. Again, we need to access the actual element using index 0 as follows:
last_element = my_list[len(my_list)-1:][0]
Slicing is another solution for accessing the last element of a Python list. However, we have to consider that this solution returns a new list containing only the last element, and we have to access the actual element using index 0. Therefore many developers prefer the solutions seen above.
