Python - Arrays

Python's standard data types list, tuple and string are sequences. A sequence object is an ordered collection of items. Each item is characterized by incrementing index starting with zero. Moreover, items in a sequence need not be of same type. In other words, a list or tuple may consist of items of different data type.

This feature is different from the concept of an array in C or C++. In C/C++, an array is also an indexed collection of items, but the items must be of similar data type. In C/C++, you have an array of integers or floats, or strings, but you cannot have an array with some elements of integer type and some of different type. A C/C++ array is therefore a homogenous collection of data types.

Python's standard library has array module. The array class in it allows you to construct an array of three basic types, integer, float and Unicode characters.

Syntax

The syntax of creating array is −

import array
obj = array.array(typecode[, initializer])

Parameters

• typecode − The typecode character used to create the array.

• initializer − array initialized from the optional value, which must be a list, a bytes-like object, or iterable over elements of the appropriate type.

Return type

The array() constructor returns an object of array.array class

Example

import array as arr

# creating an array with integer type
a = arr.array('i', [1, 2, 3])
print (type(a), a)

# creating an array with char type
a = arr.array('u', 'BAT')
print (type(a), a)

# creating an array with float type
a = arr.array('d', [1.1, 2.2, 3.3])
print (type(a), a)

It will produce the following output −

<class 'array.array'> array('i', [1, 2, 3])
<class 'array.array'> array('u', 'BAT')
<class 'array.array'> array('d', [1.1, 2.2, 3.3])

Arrays are sequence types and behave very much like lists, except that the type of objects stored in them is constrained.

Python array type is decided by a single character Typecode argument. The type codes and the intended data type of array is listed below −

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