checking if a list is empty

Richard Thomas chardster at gmail.com
Fri May 6 06:34:40 EDT 2011


On May 6, 7:36 am, Jabba Laci <jabba.l... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If I want to check if a list is empty, which is the more pythonic way?
>
> li = []
>
> (1) if len(li) == 0:
> ...
> or
> (2) if not li:
> ...
>
> Thanks,
>
> Laszlo

I prefer (1), it feels more explicit about what I'm testing. The fact
that empty sequences evaluate as false feels like a bit of a quirk to
me. Actually the fact that 0 evaluates as false feels like a bit of a
quirk to me, I more of a "use booleans in boolean contexts" kind of
programmer.



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