ARRAYS

Chapter 2: Introduction
Arrays

Objectives
In this Chapter you will learn to:
 Explore the array data structure
 Explore the list data structure
 Introduction
 Array is a container which can hold a fix number of items and these items should be of the same type.
 Most of the data structures make use of arrays to implement their algorithms. Following are the
important terms to understand the concept of Array.
 Element− Each item stored in an array is called an element.
 Index − Each location of an element in an array has a numerical index, which is used to identify the
element.
 Introduction
 Basic Operations of an Array
 Following are the basic operations supported by an array.
 Traverse − print all the array elements one by one.
 Insertion − Adds an element at the given index.
 Deletion − Deletes an element at the given index.
 Search − Searches an element using the given index or by the value.
 Update − Updates an element at the given index.
 Introduction
 Array is created in Python by importing array module to the python program.
 Then, the array is declared as shown below
 Introduction
 Creating our first array
 create an array named array1.
 Introduction
 Explanation
 from array import *
 The import * it means we are importing everything associated with the array module
 Here we creating an array called array1 and we use the array module.
 We use the typecode (i) indicating that we are dealing with a signed integer
 Elements in the array are accessed from index position 0
 We use an object x to iterate in our array1 so that we can print all the elements in array1
 for x in array1:
 print(x)
 Lets say we just want to print a specific element in our array, we can make use of the index position of the
element.
 We can say print(array1[0])
 We printing the element at index position 0, which means it’s the first element in our array
 Deleting an array element
 Deletion refers to removing an existing element from the array and re-organising all elements of an
array.
 We can remove an element from the array, using the python in-built remove() method.
 This will remove element 10 from the array
 Searching for an array element
 We can search for an array element based on its value or its index.
 Here, we search a data element, by using the python in-built index() method.
 This will show the index position associated with the element, if the element is not there, an exception
will be raised
 This will print 2, the index position of element 50
 Updating an array element
 We can update an array element and assign it a new value.
 To do that, we need to indicate the index of the element we want to update its value and then assign the
new value to the element.
 Element at index position 3 which is 90 has been updated to 200
 Using the sum function
 Python has an inbuilt function for the sum
 We can use the function to calculate the sum of array elements
 Using the array range
 We can use the range to indicate the elements that we want to print from an array
 The elements to be printed is from index position 1 to index position 2: That’s 100 and 50
 We can also print all the elements starting from a certain index position like index 1:
 This will print all elements 100, 50, 90
 Lists in Python
 The list is a most versatile datatype available in Python, which can be written as a list of comma-
separated values (items) between square brackets.
 An important thing about the list is that, items in a list need not be of the same type.
 Here we can create two lists as shown
 We use the for loop to print the elements in the list
 Lists in Python
 We can also update a list using the same method we used when dealing with an array
 Here we have changed the element at index position 2 to kadoma
Basic List Operations
 task
 Find the largest number in a list
 You are given the following numbers in a list
 number = [200, 10, 1000, 500, 40, 999]
 Find the largest number
solution
 List methods
 append you add element at the end of the list
 insert you put an element at a specific index position
 remove you remove an element from the list
 clear you remove all the elements from the list
 Show the output on each method when its called
 Sorting elements in a list
 We can sort elements in a list using these two methods: sort and reverse
 Sort method we sort in ascending order
 Reverse method we sort in descending order
 Any questions

Any questions?