3.6.2 Using the range function

Often we want to do something a large number of times, in which case typing all the numbers becomes tedious. The range() function returns a list of numbers, allowing us to avoid typing them ourselves.

You should give range() at least two^3.7 parameters^3.8: first the number at which the list starts and then the number up to which the list should go. Note that the second number itself is not in the range but numbers up to this number are. This may seem strange but there are reasons.

By way of example, we could have replicated the function of the for loop above (3.6.1) using range(6) since:

      >>> print range(0, 6)
      [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

So we could have constructed the for loop as follows:

      for i in range(0, 6):
          print "i now equal to:", i
          sumsquares = sumsquares + i**2
          # etc.

Here is another example of the use of range():

      >>> print range(5, 10)
      [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

If you are uncertain what parametes to give range() to get it to execute your for loop the required number of times, just find the difference between the first and second parameters. This is then the number of times the contents of the for loop will be executed.

You may also specify the step, i.e. the difference between successive items. As we have seen above, if you do not specify the step the default is one.

      >>> print range(10, 20, 2)
      [10, 12, 14, 16, 18]

Note that this goes up to 18, not 19, as the step is 2.

You can always get the number of elements the list produced by range() will contain (and therefore the number of times the for loop will be executed) by finding the difference between the first and second parameters and dividing that by the step. For example range(10, 20, 2) produces a list with 5 elements since .

The range function will only produce lists of integers. If you want to do something like print out the numbers from 0 to 1, separated by 0.1 some ingenuity is required:

      for i in range(0, 10):
          print i / 10

EXERCISE 3.6
Use the range function to create a list containing the numbers 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20.

Write a program to read a number from the keyboard and then print a ``table'' (don't worry about lining things up yet) of the value of and from 1 up to the number the user typed, in steps of, say, 2.

Footnotes

... two ^3.7: range() can actually be used with just one parameter (the number to stop at), but you will make less mistakes if you use two.
...parameters ^3.8: See Section 3.9 for a discussion of parameters: for now it is enough to know that they are the things placed within the parentheses.