Get Last Element of List in Python

Obtain a Python list’s last element

A sample list:

You can access the last element of a list by using negative indexing, specifically index -1 in Python:

list = [23,    34,   55,   67]]
last_element = list[-1]

The above code will return the value ’67’ which is the last element of the list.

Get specific element of a list

In Python, you can access specific elements of a list by using their index position. For example:

list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
specific_element = list[2]

The above code will return the value ‘3‘ which is the element at index position 2 in the list. Note that in Python, indexing starts from 0, so the first element has index 0, the second element has index 1, and so on.

Adding Element to the End of a List

To add an element to the end of a list in Python, you can use the .append() method. Here’s an example:

my_list = [1, 2, 3]
my_list.append(4)
print(my_list)

In this example, we start with a list ‘[1, 2, 3]‘. We then use the ‘.append()‘ method to add the number ‘4‘ to the end of the list. Finally, we print the modified list using the ‘print()‘ function. The output of this code will be:

[1, 2, 3, 4]

Note that the ‘.append()‘ method modifies the original list in place, rather than creating a new list. If you want to add multiple elements to a list, you can pass them as separate arguments to the ‘.append()‘ method, or you can use the ‘.extend()‘ method to add a sequence of elements to the end of the list.

Modifying Last Element of Any List

To modify the last element of a list in Python, you can access the last element using negative indexing and assign a new value to it. Here’s an example:

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

In this example, we start with a list ‘[1, 2, 3]‘. We then access the last element of the list using negative indexing (i.e., ‘my_list[-1]‘), and assign a new value ‘4‘ to it. Finally, we print the modified list using the ‘print()‘ function. The output of this code will be:

[1, 2, 4]

Note that this approach modifies the original list in place, rather than creating a new list. If the list is empty, trying to access the last element using negative indexing will result in an ‘IndexError‘ exception.