# question about slicing with a step length

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Thu Mar 9 02:12:34 CET 2006

John Salerno wrote:
> Given:
>
> numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>
> can someone explain to me why
>
> numbers[10:0:-2] results in [10, 8, 6, 4, 2]?

I always have trouble with these.  Given the docs[1]:

"""
The slice of s from i to j with step k is defined as the sequence of
items with index x = i + n*k such that $0 \leq n < \frac{j-i}{k}$. In
other words, the indices are i, i+k, i+2*k, i+3*k and so on, stopping
when j is reached (but never including j). If i or j  is greater than
len(s), use len(s). If i or j are omitted then they become end''
values (which end depends on the sign of k). Note, k cannot be zero.
"""

I would expect that we're looking at the indices
10 + n*(-2)
such that
0 <= n < (0-10)/-2
0 <= n < 5
which should be indices 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 which would skip 10 so as not to
provoke an IndexError, and then give you the list [9, 7, 3, 5, 1].

Clearly that's not what happens.  Looks like there's a rule in there
somewhere that says if the start is greater than the length, use the
length instead.  That would mean starting at 9 instead of 10, and
getting the indices 9, 7, 5, 3, 1 which would give you the list [10, 8,
6, 4, 2]

Hmm...  Is there some documentation I'm missing that says the start
index will be replaced with the length if necessary?  I'll file a doc
patch if it looks like I'm not just missing something somewhere else...

STeVe

[1]http://docs.python.org/lib/typesseq.html