Strange result when removing item from a list while iterating over it

Question

I've got this piece of code:

numbers = range(1, 50)  for i in numbers:     if i < 20:         numbers.remove(i)  print(numbers) 

but the result I'm getting is:
[2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49]

Of course, I'm expecting the numbers below 20 to not appear in the results. Looks like I'm doing something wrong with the remove.

Answer 1

You're modifying the list while you iterate over it. That means that the first time through the loop, i == 1, so 1 is removed from the list. Then the for loop goes to the second item in the list, which is not 2, but 3! Then that's removed from the list, and then the for loop goes on to the third item in the list, which is now 5. And so on. Perhaps it's easier to visualize like so, with a ^ pointing to the value of i:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...]  ^ 

That's the state of the list initially; then 1 is removed and the loop goes to the second item in the list:

[2, 3, 4, 5, 6...]     ^ [2, 4, 5, 6...]        ^ 

And so on.

There's no good way to alter a list's length while iterating over it. The best you can do is something like this:

numbers = [n for n in numbers if n >= 20] 

or this, for in-place alteration (the thing in parens is a generator expression, which is implicitly converted into a tuple before slice-assignment):

numbers[:] = (n for in in numbers if n >= 20) 

If you want to perform an operation on n before removing it, one trick you could try is this:

for i, n in enumerate(numbers):     if n < 20 :         print("do something")         numbers[i] = None numbers = [n for n in numbers if n is not None]