accessing front of a list

[Hans Nowak]

Simon Bunker wrote:
> This is probably a fairly newbie question - and also because I am
> coming from a Perl background. I was wondering if there is a Python
> equivilant to Perls shift operator?
> 
> There seem to be many ways of getting access to the end of an array -
> pop() append() etc but I couldn't find anyting to shift off the front like
> when
> reading in argv.

You probably want pop(0):

 >>> a = range(5)
 >>> x = a.pop(0)
 >>> x
0
 >>> a
[1, 2, 3, 4]

...but destructive processing of lists this way is relatively rare, IMHO.

> This may be becausde I was only learning from the online tutorial/docs which
> I have't finished going through. Are there any books worth buying -
> particularly
> O'Reilley ones? I have seen Learning Python but don't know if this will
> cover much more
> (although the Perl Llama book isalways useful for Perl), the Programming
> Python
> and Python Cookbook and the Standalrd Library book. It would be nice if
> there was a
> "in a Nutshell" one.

People are working on it...

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