Will McGugan wrote: > Steven Watanabe wrote: > >>I know that the standard idioms for clearing a list are: >> >> (1) mylist[:] = [] >> (2) del mylist[:] >> >>I guess I'm not in the "slicing frame of mind", as someone put it, but >>can someone explain what the difference is between these and: >> >> (3) mylist = [] >> >>Why are (1) and (2) preferred? I think the first two are changing the >>list in-place, but why is that better? Isn't the end result the same? > > > I'm wondering why there is no 'clear' for lists. It feels like a common > operation for mutable containers. :-/ > Because it's just as easy to create and assign a new empty list (and have the old unused one garbage collected).
l = [] is all you need! regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list