How to Find Length of List in Python?

A Python list can contain heterogeneous elements in sequential order. Unlike other programming-languages Python does not support built-in array data structure, but the list provides an alternative for it. Using the list, we can also store duplicate items.

In Python, we have an in-built function len() which calculates the total number of elements present in a list and return the value. In this tutorial, we have mentioned the Python len() function in detail. And by the end of this tutorial, you will get a brief idea of how can you use len() function to find out the length of a list.

Python List

The list is a python built-in data structure that can store data elements in a sequence. And like arrays, the Python list uses indexing to access an individual element.

Example

my_list = [1,2,3,4,5]
print(my_list[0])
print(my_list[4])

Output

1
5

How to Find Length of List in Python?

In Python, we can use two techniques to find out the total number of elements present in a List.

• Python len() method
• Use naive method

1. Python len() method

len() is a Python in-built method, that accepts iterable objects as a parameter and returns the total number of elements parent in that iterable object. It is the most commonly used python method to find out the lent of a list or any iterable object.

Example

my_list = ["Welcome", "to", "techgeekbuzz",101]
print(len(my_list))

Output

4

2. Naive Method

Generally, we use the len() method to find out the length of a string. But we can also write a user-defined function which would work similarly to the len() method. In the naive method, we use a loop and a counter variable. Using the loop we traverse through the list elements and increase the counter count.

Example

def count(my_list):
    counter=0
    for i in my_list:
        counter+=1
    return counter

my_list =["Welcome", "to", "techgeekbuzz", 101]
print(count(my_list))

Output

4

Python length of list

• The length of a list signifies the total number of elements present in a list.
• The index value of list starts from 0 upto n-1 (n is the total number of items).
• len() is the most commonly used python method.
• The len() method return the total items present in a list or other iterable.

Conclusion

So that was all about finding the length of a list in Python. We have discussed two methods to find the total number of elements in a Python list. The first method is the len() function, which makes it pretty easy to find the length of a Python list. The second method is the Naive method in which we use a loop to traverse through a Python list and a counter variable to increase the count after each element in the list. We hope you have understood how to find the length of a list in Python. Also, if you have any queries, feel free to share them in the comments section below.

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