Slice a list of lists?

[Benjamin Kaplan]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Jonno <jonnojohnson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know that I can index into a list of lists like this:
> a=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
> a[0][2]=3
> a[2][0]=7
>
> but when I try to use fancy indexing to select the first item in each
> list I get:
> a[0][:]=[1,2,3]
> a[:][0]=[1,2,3]
>
> Why is this and is there a way to select [1,4,7]?
> --

It's not fancy indexing. It's called taking a slice of the existing
list. Look at it this way
a[0] means take the first element of a. The first element of a is [1,2,3]
a[0][:] means take all the elements in that first element of a. All
the elements of [1,2,3] are [1,2,3].

a[:] means take all the elements of a. So a[:] is [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]].
a[:][0] means take the first element of all the elements of a. The
first element of a[:] is [1,2,3].

There is no simple way to get [1,4,7] because it is just a list of
lists and not an actual matrix. You have to extract the elements
yourself.

col = []
for row in a:
    col.append(row[0])


You can do this in one line using a list comprehension:
[ row[0] for row in a ]


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