Common Useful List Methods

Functions on Iterators

• The .sort and .reverse methods reorder the list in place and do not return anything
• Commonly, you might want to loop through a list in a particular order, but not change the original list
• Python gives you two matching functions to do this, which return a new ordered version of the list, without changing the original
  • The reversed() function creates a new iterable object that returns its elements in the opposite order
  • The sorted() function creates a new iterable object that returns its elements in ascending order

Understanding Check

A = [
     'Fox',
     'Giraffe', 
     'Hippo'
    ]
A.append('Iguana')
A[:].reverse()
B = A
for anim in B:
    if anim[1] == 'i':
        B.remove(anim)
print(A)

List building with loops

• For simple lists, we will commonly explicitly write out the elements:

  even_digits = [ 2, 4, 6, 8 ]

• But in many cases, it is easier to specify the elements of a list using a sequence of values generated by a for loop. For instance

  even_digits = [ ]
  for i in range(0, 10, 2):
      even_digits.append(i)

• Python gives us a shorthand notation to achieve this:

  even_digits = [ i for i in range(0, 10, 2) ]

  • Called list comprehension

Comprehending Lists

• The simplest list comprehension syntax is:

  [ |||expression||| |||iterator||| ]

  where |||expression||| is any Python expression and |||iterator||| is a for loop header

• The iterator component can be followed by any number of additional modifiers

  • More for loop headers for nested loops
  • or if statements to only include specific values

• Example: all even numbers to 20 not also visible by 3

  [i for i in range(0,2,20) if i % 3 != 0]

Comprehension Examples

• List of valid 5 letter words

  from english import ENGLISH_WORDS
  a = [word for word in ENGLISH_WORDS if len(word) == 5]

• List of first 20 positive squares

  a = [i ** 2 for i in range(1, 21)]

• List of non-alphabetical characters in string

  s = "Jack & Jill's Story Time!"
  a = [char for char in s if not char.isalpha()]

Tabulation

• Arrays can also be useful when you have a set of values and you need to count how many values fall into a different ranges
  • Process is called tabulation
• The idea is that for each piece of data we encounter, we figure out a corresponding index in our tabulation array and then increment the value of that element
• Requires that we have an array of length equal to the number of things we want to count
• Sometimes the things we are counting will equal the index, but often we will just assign an index to different values or bins

Demo Examples

• For a random list of percentages, how many students got each main letter grade?
• For a given string, how many times does each letter appear?
• For a list of numbers between 0 and some known maximum, how often does each number appear?

Multidimensional Arrays

• We know that elements of a list can be lists in and of themselves. If the lengths of all the lists making up the elements of a list remain fixed, then the list of lists is called a multidimensional array

• In Python, we can create multidimensional arrays just by creating lists of constant length as the elements to another list

  magic = [ [2, 9, 4], [7, 5, 3], [6, 1, 8] ]

• We can always get the individual element of one of the inner lists by using two indices.

  • One to select the sublist, and then one to select the element within that sublist
    • magic[1][1] = 5
    • magic[-1][0] = 6

Picturing Multidimensional Arrays

• Multidimensional arrays are commonly pictured as each inner list being stacked beneath the previous
• In such a representation, the outermost/first elements/indices represent the row, and the inner/second elements/indices represent the column

[ [2, 9, 4], [7, 5, 3], [6, 1, 8] ]

Initialize a Chessboard

Initialize a Chessboard

Initialize a Chessboard

The GImage Class

• You can display an image from a file in PGL using the GImage class. GImage(|||filename|||, |||x|||, |||y|||)
  • |||filename||| is the string containing the name of the file which contains the image
  • |||x||| and |||y||| are the coordinates of the upper left corner of the image
• Best to use one of the common image formats
  • Graphical Interchange Format (GIF): fish.gif
  • Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG): fish.jpg
  • Portable Network Graphics (PNG): fish.png

Images and Copyrights

• Most images that you might find on the web are protected by copyright under international law.
• Ensure you have the necessary permissions before using an image
  • On the web, the image hosting site will often specify what rules apply to that image
    • Example: Images from www.nasa.gov can be freely used as long as you add an attribution line
  • Non-commercial use of an image can sometimes fall under “fair use” doctrine, but academic integrity and common courtesy both demand you cite or acknowledge any material you have obtained from others.

Example: VLA Moonset

from pgl import GImage, GWindow, GLabel

def image_example():
    gw = GWindow(800, 550)
    image = GImage("VLA_Moonset.jpg")
    image.scale(gw.get_width() / image.get_width())
    gw.add(image)

    citation = GLabel("Image Credit: Jeff Hellermann, NRAO / AUI / NSF")
    citation.set_font("15px 'Sans-Serif'")
    x = gw.get_width() - citation.get_width() - 10
    y = image.get_height() + citation.get_ascent()
    gw.add(citation, x, y)

2D Arrays → Images

• Image data is commonly stored in two-dimensional arrays

• Each element stores information about the pixel that exists at that location

• The GImage class lets you convert between the image itself and the array representing the image contents by using the get_pixel_array method, which returns a two-dimensional array of integers.

• We could get the pixels from our example image using:

  image = GImage("VLA_Moonset.jpg")
  pixels = image.get_pixel_array()

• The first index of the pixel array gets you the row, the second index gets you the column

Pixel Contents

• Each element in a pixel array is an integer in which the 32 bits are interpreted as:

• The first byte (8 bits) is the transparency or alpha
• The next three bytes indicate the amount of red, green, and blue in the pixel, where each value varies from 0 to 255
  • Form the RGB of a color, generally expressed in hexadecimal form
    • 10010101 → 0x95
    • 00111001 → 0x39
    • 01100011 → 0x63
  • Overall color: #953963 or

Combining Light Colors

Transparency

• The first byte (8 bits) of the pixel value gives the transparency, which indicates how much of the background is allowed to show through
• Often denoted with the Greek letter alpha: \(\alpha\)
• Varies from 0 to 255 like the other 8 bit values:
  • 0 is entirely transparent
  • 255 is entirely opaque

Breaking out the Colors

• You do not need to convert the pixel values yourself! PGL has built-in ways to extract the various colors