8/3/23, 16:45 for loops

for loops

Contents
Sources
Basics of for loops

 Attention

Finnish university students are encouraged to use the CSC Notebooks platform.
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Others can follow the lesson and fill in their student notebooks using Binder.
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In this lesson we introduce loops as a way of repeating parts of a Python program, such as
iterating over all of the items in a list and performing a calculation on each item.

Sources
This lesson is inspired by the Software Carpentry group’s lessons on Programming with Python.

Basics of for loops

In our last lesson we covered lists in Python, one form of a collection of values that can be
referenced by a single variable. In this lesson we will learn how to use loops. Loops allow parts of
code to be repeated some number of times, such as using a section of code to process each
item in a list.

A (bad) example
Let’s consider an example using the list below:

european_cities = ["Helsinki", "Paris", "Barcelona", "Uppsala"]

Suppose we want to check the name of each city in our list. We could use the index value for
each city and do the following:

european_cities[0]

'Helsinki'

european_cities[1]

'Paris'

european_cities[2]

'Barcelona'

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european_cities[3]

'Uppsala'

But this is a bad idea. Why? Well there are two reasons:

1. It does not scale nicely for long lists, and will take forever to type in.
2. It won’t work if the length of the list has fewer than 4 cities.

Let’s see an example with a new list.

european_cities = ["Riga", "Rome", "Athens"]

european_cities[0]

'Riga'

european_cities[1]

'Rome'

european_cities[2]

'Athens'

european_cities[3]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
IndexError Traceback (most recent call last)
/tmp/ipykernel_364/1729903104.py in <module>
----> 1 european_cities[3]

IndexError: list index out of range

Here we encounter an IndexError because we have tried to access a value outside the range of
values in the updated european_cities list.

Introducing the for loop

We could do a much better job using a for loop.

european_cities = ["Amsterdam", "Brussels", "Lisbon", "Reykjavik"]

for city in european_cities:

print(city)

Amsterdam
Brussels
Lisbon
Reykjavik

Not only is this shorter, but it is also more flexible. Let’s try printing out a different list of cities
such as ['Detroit', 'Chicago', 'Denver', 'Boston', 'Portland', 'San Francisco',
'Houston', 'Orlando']. Still works, right?

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us_cities = [
"Detroit",
"Chicago",
"Denver",
"Boston",
"Portland",
"San Francisco",
"Houston",
"Orlando",
]

for city in us_cities:

print(city)

Detroit
Chicago
Denver
Boston
Portland
San Francisco
Houston
Orlando

for loop format

for loops in Python have the general form below.

for variable in collection:

do things with variable

Let’s break down the code above to see some essential aspects of for loops:

1. The variable can be any name you like other than a reserved keyword
2. The statement of the for loop must end with a :
3. The code that should be executed as part of the loop must be indented beneath the for
loop statement
The typical indentation is 4 spaces
4. There is no additional special word needed to end the loop, you simply change the
indentation back to normal.

 Hint

for loops are useful to repeat some part of the code a finite number of times.

Your daily for loop

Source: https://www.bugmartini.com/comic/cats-eye/

Like many other programming concepts, the idea of looping through actions is something that
is already perhaps more familiar to you than you think. Consider your actions during a given
day. Many people have certain routines they follow each day, such as waking up, taking a
shower, eating breakfast and brushing their teeth. In Python code, we might represent such
actions as follows:

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for day in my_life:

wake_up()
take_shower()
eat_breakfast()
brush_teeth()
...

Note that my_life would be a list of the days of your life, and the actions you take are
represented as functions, such as wake_up(). Furthermore, by following this kind of list of
repeating actions we’re able to start the day effectively even before the first cup of coffee :).

for loop variables

Note that the variable used in a for loop is just a normal variable and still exists after the loop
has completed with the final value given to letter. Let’s loop over the list of weather conditions
below and print them to the screen. If you use weather for the loop variable, what is its value
after the for loop has completed?

weather_conditions = [
"rain",
"sleet",
"snow",
"freezing fog",
"sunny",
"cloudy",
"ice pellets",
]

for weather in weather_conditions:

print(weather)

rain
sleet
snow
freezing fog
sunny
cloudy
ice pellets

print(f"After the loop, weather is {weather}")

After the loop, weather is ice pellets

for loops and the range() function

A loop can be used to iterate over any collection of values in Python. So far we have considered
only lists, but we could also write a loop that performs a calculation a specified number of times
by using the range() function. Let’s consider an example where we use a for loop with value as
the loop variable and range(5) as the collection. What happens when you print value at each
iteration?

for value in range(5):

print(value)

0
1
2
3
4

In this case, we used a special function called range() to give us a list of 5 numbers [0, 1, 2, 3,
4] and then we printed each number in the list to the screen. When given an integer (whole
number) as an argument, range() will produce a list of numbers with a length equal to the
specified number. The list starts at 0 and ends with number - 1. You can learn a bit more about
range by typing help(range).

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help(range)

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Help on class range in module builtins:

class range(object)
| range(stop) -> range object
| range(start, stop[, step]) -> range object
|
| Return an object that produces a sequence of integers from start (inclusive)
| to stop (exclusive) by step. range(i, j) produces i, i+1, i+2, ..., j-1.
| start defaults to 0, and stop is omitted! range(4) produces 0, 1, 2, 3.
| These are exactly the valid indices for a list of 4 elements.
| When step is given, it specifies the increment (or decrement).
|
| Methods defined here:
|
| __bool__(self, /)
| self != 0
|
| __contains__(self, key, /)
| Return key in self.
|
| __eq__(self, value, /)
| Return self==value.
|
| __ge__(self, value, /)
| Return self>=value.
|
| __getattribute__(self, name, /)
| Return getattr(self, name).
|
| __getitem__(self, key, /)
| Return self[key].
|
| __gt__(self, value, /)
| Return self>value.
|
| __hash__(self, /)
| Return hash(self).
|
| __iter__(self, /)
| Implement iter(self).
|
| __le__(self, value, /)
| Return self<=value.
|
| __len__(self, /)
| Return len(self).
|
| __lt__(self, value, /)
| Return self<value.
|
| __ne__(self, value, /)
| Return self!=value.
|
| __reduce__(...)
| Helper for pickle.
|
| __repr__(self, /)
| Return repr(self).
|
| __reversed__(...)
| Return a reverse iterator.
|
| count(...)
| rangeobject.count(value) -> integer -- return number of occurrences of value
|
| index(...)
| rangeobject.index(value) -> integer -- return index of value.
| Raise ValueError if the value is not present.
|
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Static methods defined here:
|
| __new__(*args, **kwargs) from builtins.type
| Create and return a new object. See help(type) for accurate signature.
|
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Data descriptors defined here:
|
| start
|
| step
|
| stop

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Check your understanding

The program below will print numbers to the screen using the range() function.

for i in range(...):
print(i)

Using the documentation that is produced when you run help(range), what values would you
replace the ... in the parentheses of the range() function with to have the following output
printed to the screen?

2
5
8

You can test your solution in the cell below and select your answer from the poll options at
https://geo-python.github.io/poll/.

# Here's one possible solution

for i in range(2, 9, 3):
print(i)

2
5
8

Looping over the length of lists using index values

Since we already know how to find the length of a list using the len() function, we can now take
advantage of this knowledge to make our for loops more flexible. Starting with the list of
numbers below, let’s use the range() function to loop over the list of numbers and add the
value of the loop variable i to each value. In addition, we can add a few print statements to
display the values of i and numbers[i] within the loop. In the cell below the for loop, you can
print the list of numbers again to see the updated values.

 Tip

We will print numbers[i] before and after the addition in the for loop to see how the
values change.

numbers = [5, 6, 7, 8]

for i in range(len(numbers)):
print(f"Value of i: {i}")
print(f"Value of numbers[i] before addition: {numbers[i]}")
numbers[i] = numbers[i] + i
print(f"Value of numbers[i] after addition: {numbers[i]}")
print("")

Value of i: 0
Value of numbers[i] before addition: 5
Value of numbers[i] after addition: 5

Value of i: 1
Value of numbers[i] before addition: 6
Value of numbers[i] after addition: 7

Value of i: 2
Value of numbers[i] before addition: 7
Value of numbers[i] after addition: 9

Value of i: 3
Value of numbers[i] before addition: 8
Value of numbers[i] after addition: 11

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print(numbers)

[5, 7, 9, 11]

Let’s see what we can observe:

1. You can see that because we are using the range() function, the value assigned to the loop
variable i starts with 0 and increases by 1 each time through the loop.
2. You can see the value in the list numbers at index i each time through the loop, and how
that value changes when it is increased by adding i.
3. The value that changes in the list numbers in each iteration through this for loop is the
value at index i, while the other values are not updated. This occurs because we’re
assigning a new value at numbers[i].
4. Note that the values for numbers[i] on the right side of the equation is the “old” value.
That “old” value is increased by i first, and then stored as the updated value numbers[i].

 Note

The variable i is commonly used to denote the index variable in loops. Loops can
sometimes occur with another loop (referred to as nested loops), in which case other
index variables such as j or k may be used.

Why use index values to loop over a list?

Good question. First off, if you want to update individual values in a list you’re likely going to
need a loop that includes the index values. There are functions such as enumerate() that can
help, but their use can be somewhat confusing for new programmers. Second, in cases where
you have multiple lists that are related to one another, it can be handy to use a loop with the
index values to be able to access corresponding locations in each list. For this, let’s consider an
example with the two lists below.

cities = ["Helsinki", "Stockholm", "Oslo", "Reykjavik", "Copenhagen"]

countries = ["Finland", "Sweden", "Norway", "Iceland", "Denmark"]

As you can see we have 5 cities and 5 corresponding counties. Can you print out each pair using
a single for loop?

for i in range(len(cities)):
print(f"{cities[i]} is the capital of {countries[i]}")

Helsinki is the capital of Finland

Stockholm is the capital of Sweden
Oslo is the capital of Norway
Reykjavik is the capital of Iceland
Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark

Cool. So as you can see, the index i is used in this case to access each item in the two lists of
cities and countries and allow us to print out the city/country pairs. We’ll get more practice with
this kind of thing in the exercises for this week.

 Note

In the example above, we used the length of the list cities in the range() function. We
could just as easily used the list countries to define the values of i since both lists are
the same length.

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Check your understanding

What output would the following program produce?

odd_numbers = [1, 3, 5, 7, 9]
even_numbers = [10, 4, 6, 8, 2]
for i in range(len(odd_numbers)):
print(odd_numbers[i] + even_numbers[i])

Try to think about the loop without running the code and then select your answer from the poll
options at https://geo-python.github.io/poll/.

# Here's the solution

odd_numbers = [1, 3, 5, 7, 9]
even_numbers = [10, 4, 6, 8, 2]
for i in range(len(odd_numbers)):
print(odd_numbers[i] + even_numbers[i])

11
7
11
15
11

© Copyright 2016-2022, D. Whipp, H. Tenkanen, V. Heikinheimo, H. Aagesen, and C. Fink, Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki.
Last updated on Oct 20, 2022.

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