Beginners question.

Player asif at go-away-spammer.com
Tue Aug 31 13:23:23 EDT 2004


Hi all

 I am teaching myself python and so am following a few tutorials from 
online.

In one of the tutorials an exercise is the following...

 As an exercise, write a loop that traverses the previous list and prints 
the length of each element.

Firstly I just wanted to see if I could get the length out of those elements 
that were list type.
I no thats not exactly what the exercise asks for, but I thought I would 
start there.
However I am stuck and cant figure out why my code is doing what it's doing.
My code is as follows....

mylist = [1, 2, ["three", "four"], "five"]
for item in mylist:
    if item == type(list):
        myitem = len(item)
        print myitem
    else:
         print item

All my code seems to do is print out each element of the list on a new line.
What I had expected it to do was this....
1
2
2
'five'

but it doesn't, what it does do is this...

1
2
['three', 'four']
'five'

I expected the line,
myitem = len(item)
 to issue the variable, myitem, with a value that was the length of item.
But as you cans ee it doesn't and simply ignores all that code and does the
else:
    print item
part instead, misisng out the first half of the for loop.

Were am I going wrong ??

Thanks in advance for any help :)

M.B aka - Player -

-- 
*************
The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-
he awoke and found it truth.
John Keats.
************* 





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