A Practical Guide to Iterating Through Data Structures and Applying Conditionals in Python

Updated: at 03:01 AM

Python provides a variety of built-in data structures like lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets etc. that store data in different ways. Iterating through these data structures and applying conditional logic is an essential aspect of Python programming. This guide will walk through practical examples to help you master iterating and conditional programming in Python.

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Overview of Data Structures in Python

Let’s first briefly introduce the main data structures in Python that we will be covering in this guide:

Lists

Lists are ordered sequences of elements enclosed in square brackets []. Lists can contain elements of different data types like integers, strings etc. Elements can be accessed by index, with the first element at index 0. Lists are mutable, meaning the elements can be changed after creation.

# Create a list
languages = ['Python', 'R', 'Java']

# Access element at index 0
print(languages[0]) # 'Python'

# Change element at index 2
languages[2] = 'JavaScript'
print(languages) # ['Python', 'R', 'JavaScript']

Tuples

Tuples are similar to lists, but the elements are enclosed in parentheses () and are immutable, meaning they cannot be changed once created.

digits = (0, 1, 2, 3, 4)

# Access element at index 3
print(digits[3]) # 3

# Tuples cannot be modified
digits[2] = 5 # Throws error

Dictionaries

Dictionaries consist of key-value pairs enclosed in curly braces {}. The keys are used to access the values. Dictionaries are unordered and mutable.

person = {'name': 'John', 'age': 20, 'jobs': ['Software Engineer', 'Writer']}

# Access value using key
print(person['name']) # 'John'

# Add new key-value pair
person['city'] = 'New York'

Sets

Sets are unordered collections of unique elements enclosed in curly braces {}. They can perform fast membership testing and eliminate duplicates. Sets are mutable but cannot contain duplicate elements.

colors = {'red', 'blue', 'green'}

# Add new element
colors.add('violet')

# Sets do not allow duplicates
colors.add('blue') # No error, but duplicate not added

Now that we have a basic understanding of Python’s data structures, let’s go through examples of iterating through them and applying conditional logic.

Iterating Through Data Structures

We can loop over the elements in data structures to access each element sequentially. The two main ways to iterate in Python are for loops and while loops.

For Loops

For loops allow iterating over elements of a sequence like lists, tuples, strings etc. The basic syntax is:

for element in sequence:
  # Do something with element

Let’s go through examples of for loops with different data structures:

Lists

languages = ['Python', 'R', 'Java']

for language in languages:
  print(language)

# Output:
# Python
# R
# Java

We can also access the index within the for loop using enumerate():

for index, language in enumerate(languages):
  print(f'{index}: {language}')

# Output:
# 0: Python
# 1: R
# 2: Java

Tuples

digits = (0, 1, 2, 3, 4)

for digit in digits:
  print(digit)

# Output:
# 0
# 1
# 2
# 3
# 4

Dictionaries

For dictionaries, we can iterate through keys, values or key-value pairs:

person = {'name': 'John', 'age': 20, 'jobs': ['Software Engineer', 'Writer']}

# Iterate through keys
for key in person:
  print(key)

# Iterate through values
for value in person.values():
  print(value)

# Iterate through key-value pairs
for key, value in person.items():
  print(f'{key}: {value}')

This prints:

name
age
jobs

John
20
['Software Engineer', 'Writer']

name: John
age: 20
jobs: ['Software Engineer', 'Writer']

Sets

Since sets are unordered, elements are accessed in arbitrary order.

colors = {'red', 'blue', 'green'}

for color in colors:
  print(color)

# Output (in random order):
# green
# red
# blue

While Loops

While loops continue executing a block of code as long as the condition is true.

count = 0

while count < 5:
  print(count)
  count += 1

This prints numbers 0 to 4.

While loops are useful when the number of iterations is not known and depends on a condition.

Applying Conditionals

We can control the flow of iteration using conditional statements like if, else and elif. Let’s look at some examples:

If Statements

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

for number in numbers:
  if number % 2 == 0:
    print(f'{number} is even')
  else:
    print(f'{number} is odd')

# Output:
# 1 is odd
# 2 is even
# 3 is odd
# 4 is even
# 5 is odd

This checks if each number is even or odd.

We can add an optional elif (else if) to check multiple conditions:

grade = 'B'

if grade == 'A':
  print('Excellent')
elif grade == 'B':
  print('Good')
elif grade == 'C':
  print('Fair')
else:
  print('Poor')

# Output: Good

Nested Conditionals

We can have conditionals inside other conditionals to check complex logic.

person = {'name': 'John', 'age': 20, 'jobs': ['Software Engineer', 'Writer']}

if 'name' in person:
  name = person['name']

  if name == 'John':
    print(f'{name} is a Software Engineer!')

  else:
    print(f'{name} is some other person.')

else:
  print('Person has no name!')

This first checks if ‘name’ key exists in dictionary, then checks if name equals ‘John’ and prints appropriate message.

Conditional Expressions

We can use conditional expressions like x if C else y to inline simple conditionals and make code more concise:

values = [1, 2, 3, 4]

print('Even' if x%2==0 else 'Odd' for x in values)

# Output:
# Odd
# Even
# Odd
# Even

This prints if each number is even or odd in one line without using an if-else block.

Practical Examples

Let’s now look at some practical real-world examples combining iteration and conditionals in Python.

Filtering a List

We can filter a list to contain only elements that satisfy a condition using a list comprehension:

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]

even_numbers = [x for x in numbers if x%2 == 0]
print(even_numbers)

# Output: [2, 4, 6, 8, 10]

This creates a new list even_numbers containing only even numbers from the numbers list.

Finding the Maximum Value

To find the maximum value in a collection, we can iterate through the elements and keep track of the largest value seen:

values = [10, 3, 8, 14, 9]

maximum = values[0]

for value in values:
  if value > maximum:
    maximum = value

print(maximum) # 14

Here we assume first element is maximum initially, then compare each subsequent element to update maximum if a larger value is found.

Counting Occurences

To count occurrences of items in a collection, we can utilize a dictionary to keep track of frequencies:

names = ['John', 'Mary', 'Lucy', 'Mary', 'John', 'Lucy']

name_counts = {}

for name in names:
  if name in name_counts:
    name_counts[name] += 1
  else:
    name_counts[name] = 1

print(name_counts)

# {'John': 2, 'Mary': 2, 'Lucy': 2}

This counts how many times each name appears in the list using the dictionary.

Dictionary Comprehensions

Comprehensions provide a concise way to transform or filter data structures. We can create a dictionary comprehension to invert keys and values of a dictionary:

person = {'name': 'John', 'age': 20, 'jobs': ['Software Engineer', 'Writer']}

inverted = {value : key for key, value in person.items()}
print(inverted)

# Output:
# {'John' : 'name', 20 : 'age', ['Software Engineer', 'Writer'] : 'jobs'}

This creates a new dictionary with values as keys and keys as values.

As we have seen, iterating over data structures while applying conditional logic is a common programming task. Mastering these core concepts provides a strong foundation for solving real-world problems using Python.

Summary