How to delete an element from a list in Python
When working with lists, one often needs to remove certain elements from them permanently. Luckily, Python provides many different yet simple methods to remove an element from a list.
remove()
remove() deletes the first instance of a value in a list. This method should be used when one knows exactly which value they want to delete regardless of the index. The code below demonstrates this:
l = [1, 4, 6, 2, 6, 1]print("List before calling remove function:")print(l)l.remove(6)print("List after calling remove function:")print(l)
del
del can be used to delete a single index of a list, a slice of a list, or the complete list. For this shot, let’s look at how we can delete a value at a certain index with the del keyword:
l = [1, 4, 6, 2, 6, 1]print("List before calling del:")print(l)del l[3]print("List after calling del:")print(l)
pop()
The pop method removes an element at a given index and returns its value. The code below shows an example of this:
l = [1, 4, 6, 2, 6, 1]print("List before calling pop function:")print(l)print(l.pop(4))print("List after calling pop function:")print(l)
Note: The argument passed to the
popmethod is optional. If not passed, the default index (-1) is passed as an argument so the last element in the list is removed.
