enumerate.rst

Enumerate

Enumerate is a built-in function of Python. It's usefulness can not be summarized in a single line. Yet most of the newcomers and even some advanced programmers are unaware of it. It allows us to loop over something and have an automatic counter. Here is an example:

for counter, value in enumerate(some_list):
    print(counter, value)

This is not it. enumerate also accepts some optional arguments which make it even more useful.

my_list = ['apple', 'banana', 'grapes', 'pear']
for c, value in enumerate(my_list, 1):
    print(c, value)

# Output:
# 1 apple
# 2 banana
# 3 grapes
# 4 pear

The optional argument allows us to tell enumerate from where to start the index. You can also create tuples containing the index and list item using a list. Here is an example:

my_list = ['apple', 'banana', 'grapes', 'pear']
counter_list = list(enumerate(my_list, 1))
print(counter_list)
# Output: [(1, 'apple'), (2, 'banana'), (3, 'grapes'), (4, 'pear')]