Repeating Actions with Loops

Overview

Teaching: 30 min
Exercises: 30 min

Questions

• How can I do the same operations on many different values?

Objectives

• Explain what a for loop does.

• Correctly write for loops to repeat simple calculations.

• Trace changes to a loop variable as the loop runs.

• Trace changes to other variables as they are updated by a for loop.

It is very good coding practise to reuse as much code as posible as generally, the fewer lines of code there are, the fewer bugs you’ll have. Loops are a very good way of doing this where a block of code is repeated a number of times or on each element in a collection. An example task that we might want to repeat is printing each character in a word on a line of its own.

word = "lead"

We can access a character in a string using its index. For example, we can get the first character of the word "lead", by using word[0]. One way to print each character is to use four print statements:

print(word[0])
print(word[1])
print(word[2])
print(word[3])

l
e
a
d

This is a bad approach for two reasons:

1. It doesn’t scale: if we want to print the characters in a string that’s hundreds of letters long, we’d be better off just typing them in.

2. It’s fragile: if we give it a longer string, it only prints part of the data, and if we give it a shorter one, it produces an error because we’re asking for characters that don’t exist.

word = 'tin'
print(word[0])
print(word[1])
print(word[2])
print(word[3])

t
i
n

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
IndexError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-3-7974b6cdaf14> in <module>()
      3 print(word[1])
      4 print(word[2])
----> 5 print(word[3])

IndexError: string index out of range

Here’s a better approach:

word = 'lead'
for char in word:
    print(char)

l
e
a
d

This is shorter — certainly shorter than something that prints every character in a hundred-letter string — and more robust as well:

word = 'oxygen'
for char in word:
    print(char)

o
x
y
g
e
n

The improved version uses a for loop to repeat an operation — in this case, printing — once for each thing in a sequence. The general form of a loop is:

for variable in collection:
    # do things with variable

Using the oxygen example above, the loop might look like this:

where each character (char) in the variable word is looped through and printed one character after another. The numbers in the diagram denote which loop cycle the character was printed in (1 being the first loop, and 6 being the final loop).

We can call the loop variable (char in this case) anything we like, but there must be a colon at the end of the line starting the loop, and we must indent anything we want to run inside the loop. Unlike many other languages, there is no command to signify the end of the loop body (e.g. end for); what is indented after the for statement belongs to the loop.

What’s in a name?

In the example above, the loop variable was given the name char as a mnemonic; it is short for ‘character’. We can choose any name we want for variables. We might just as easily have chosen the name banana for the loop variable, as long as we use the same name when we invoke the variable inside the loop:

word = 'oxygen'
for banana in word:
    print(banana)

o
x
y
g
e
n

It is a good idea to choose variable names that are meaningful though, otherwise it would be more difficult to understand what the loop is doing.

Here’s another loop that repeatedly updates a variable:

length = 0
for vowel in 'aeiou':
    length = length + 1
print('There are', length, 'vowels')

There are 5 vowels

It’s worth tracing the execution of this little program step by step. Since there are five characters in 'aeiou', the statement on line 3 will be executed five times. The first time around, length is zero (the value assigned to it on line 1) and vowel is 'a'. The statement adds 1 to the old value of length, producing 1, and updates length to refer to that new value. The next time around, vowel is 'e' and length is 1, so length is updated to be 2. After three more updates, length is 5; since there is nothing left in 'aeiou' for Python to process, the loop finishes and the print statement on line 4 tells us our final answer.

Note that a loop variable is just a variable that’s being used to record progress in a loop. It still exists after the loop is over, and we can re-use variables previously defined as loop variables as well:

letter = 'z'
for letter in 'abc':
    print(letter)
print('after the loop, letter is', letter)

a
b
c
after the loop, letter is c

Note also that finding the length of a string is such a common operation that Python actually has a built-in function to do it called len:

print(len('aeiou'))

5

len is much faster than any function we could write ourselves, and much easier to read than a two-line loop; it will also give us the length of many other things that we haven’t met yet, so we should always use it when we can.

From 1 to N

Python has a built-in function called range that creates a sequence of numbers. range can accept 1, 2, or 3 parameters.

• If one parameter is given, range creates an array of that length, starting at zero and incrementing by 1. For example, range(3) produces the numbers 0, 1, 2.
• If two parameters are given, range starts at the first and ends just before the second, incrementing by one. For example, range(2, 5) produces 2, 3, 4.
• If range is given 3 parameters, it starts at the first one, ends just before the second one, and increments by the third one. For exmaple range(3, 10, 2) produces 3, 5, 7, 9.

Using range, write a loop that uses range to print the first 3 natural numbers:

1
2
3

Solution

for i in range(1, 4):
   print(i)

Turn a String Into a List

Use a for-loop to convert the string “hello” into a list of letters:

["h", "e", "l", "l", "o"]

Hint: You can create an empty list like this:

my_list = []

Solution

my_list = []
for char in "hello":
    my_list.append(char)
print(my_list)

Count Occurances of Letters in a String

Count the number of occurances of each letter in a string. Use a dictionary to store the number of times each letter, e.g. letter_freq['a'] gives the number of times the letter 'a' occurs. Use a loop over each character in the string and then the loop variable as the key. If the key (the current letter) hasn’t been encountered before, (e.g. if not 'a' in letter_freq) then you’ll need to initialise that key of the dictionary to zero. If it has, simply add one to the current total.

Solution

my_str = "A long string that contains lots of different letters"
letter_freq = {}
for char in my_str:
   if not char in letter_freq:
       letter_freq[char] = 0
   letter_freq[char] += 1
print("Letter frequency:  ", letter_freq)

Reverse a String

Knowing that two strings can be concatenated using the + operator, write a loop that takes a string and produces a new string with the characters in reverse order, so 'Newton' becomes 'notweN'.

Solution

newstring = ''
oldstring = 'Newton'
for char in oldstring:
   newstring = char + newstring
print(newstring)

Key Points

• Use for variable in sequence to process the elements of a sequence one at a time.

• The body of a for loop must be indented.

• Use len(thing) to determine the length of something that contains other values.