Loops

Learning Objectives

  • Explain what a for loop does.
  • Correctly write for loops to repeat simple calculations.
  • Trace changes to a loop variable as the loop runs.
  • Trace changes to other variables as they are updated by a for loop.

An example task that we might want to repeat is printing each character in a word on a line of its own. One way to do this would be to use a series of print statements:

word = 'lead'
print(word[0])
print(word[1])
print(word[2])
print(word[3])
l
e
a
d

This is a bad approach for two reasons:

  1. It doesn't scale: if we want to print the characters in a string that's hundreds of letters long, we'd be better off just typing them in.

  2. It's fragile: if we give it a longer string, it only prints part of the data, and if we give it a shorter one, it produces an error because we're asking for characters that don't exist.

word = 'tin'
print(word[0])
print(word[1])
print(word[2])
print(word[3])
t
i
n
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
IndexError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-3-7974b6cdaf14> in <module>()
      3 print(word[1])
      4 print(word[2])
----> 5 print(word[3])

IndexError: string index out of range

Here's a better approach:

word = 'lead'
for char in word:
    print(char)
l
e
a
d

This is shorter, certainly shorter than something that prints every character in a hundred-letter string, and more robust as well:

word = 'oxygen'
for char in word:
    print(char)
o
x
y
g
e
n

The improved version uses a for loop) to repeat an operation-in this case, printing-once for each thing in a collection. The general form of a loop is:

for variable in collection:
    do things with variable

We can call the loop variable anything we like, but there must be a colon at the end of the line starting the loop, and we must indent anything we want to run inside the loop. Unlike many other languages, there is no command to signify the end of the loop body (e.g. end for); anything that is indented after the for statement belongs to the loop.

Here's another loop that repeatedly updates a variable:

length = 0
for vowel in 'aeiou':
    length = length + 1
print('There are', length, 'vowels')
`
There are 5 vowels

It's worth tracing the execution of this little program step by step. Since there are five characters in 'aeiou', the statement on line 3 will be executed five times. The first time around, length is zero (the value assigned to it on line 1) and vowel is 'a'. The statement adds 1 to the old value of length, producing 1, and updates length to refer to that new value. The next time around, vowel is 'e' and length is 1, so length is updated to be 2. After three more updates, length is 5; since there is nothing left in 'aeiou' for Python to process, the loop finishes and the print statement on line 4 tells us our final answer.

Note that a loop variable is just a variable that's being used to record progress in a loop. It still exists after the loop is over, and we can re-use variables previously defined as loop variables as well:

letter = 'z'
for letter in 'abc':
    print(letter)
print('after the loop, letter is', letter)
a
b
c
after the loop, letter is c

Note also that finding the length of a string is such a common operation that Python actually has a built-in function to do it called len:

print(len('aeiou'))
5

len is much faster than any function we could write ourselves, and much easier to read than a two-line loop; it will also give us the length of many other things that we haven't met yet, so we should always use it when we can.

If we loop over a list, which we learnt about in the previous lesson, the loop variable is assigned elements one at a time:

odds = [1, 3, 5, 7]
for number in odds:
    print(number)
1
3
5
7

Range

Python has a built-in function called range that creates an iterator for sequence of numbers. In a nutshell, it generates special type of a Python object, which is generally used to iterate over with for loops.

In basic terms, if you want to use range() in a for loop, then you're good to go. However you can't use it purely as a list object.

for thingo in range(4):
    print(thingo)
0
1
2
3

Challenges

Computing powers with loops

Exponentiation is built into Python:

print(5 ** 3)
125

Write a loop that calculates the same result as 5 ** 3 using multiplication (and without exponentiation).

Reverse a string

Write a loop that takes a string, and produces a new string with the characters in reverse order:

i.e. 'Newton' becomes 'notweN'.

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