Python Trick

Enumerate. Python's enumerate is a mystical beast. Many of us being totally ignorant of it's power or 'magic'. Have you always wanted your list indexing to begin at 1 instead of the confusing 0? You are not alone and Python's enumerate got you covered. It does more than that. It can also be used to track the index of items as you loop through them. Let me use this example program from my mentor Dan Bader to make things clearer. (Click in the code editor below to view code)

# Normal looping through python's list

names = ['Bob', 'Alice', 'Guido']
for index, value in enumerate(names):
    print(f'{index}: {value}')

# This produces

0: Bob
1: Alice
2: Guido

# Now let's use enumerate 

names = ['Bob', 'Alice', 'Guido']
for index, value in enumerate(names, 1):
    print(f'{index}: {value}')

# This produces

1: Bob
2: Alice
3: Guido

# Voila -- Happy Pythoning.