How to treat the last element in list differently in Python?

Question

I need to do some special operation for the last element in a list. Is there any better way than this?

 array = [1,2,3,4,5]  for i, val in enumerate(array):    if (i+1) == len(array):      // Process for the last element    else:      // Process for the other element  

Answer 1

for item in list[:-1]:     print "Not last: ", item print "Last: ", list[-1] 

If you don't want to make a copy of list, you can make a simple generator:

# itr is short for "iterable" and can be any sequence, iterator, or generator  def notlast(itr):     itr = iter(itr)  # ensure we have an iterator     prev = itr.next()     for item in itr:         yield prev         prev = item  # lst is short for "list" and does not shadow the built-in list() # 'L' is also commonly used for a random list name lst = range(4) for x in notlast(lst):     print "Not last: ", x print "Last: ", lst[-1] 

Another definition for notlast:

import itertools notlast = lambda lst:itertools.islice(lst, 0, len(lst)-1)