Meaning of List[-1] in Python

Question

I have a piece of code here that is supposed to return the least common element in a list of elements, ordered by commonality:

def getSingle(arr):
    from collections import Counter
    c = Counter(arr)

    return c.most_common()[-1]  # return the least common one -> (key,amounts) tuple

arr1 = [5, 3, 4, 3, 5, 5, 3]

counter = getSingle(arr1)

print (counter[0])

My question is in the significance of the -1 in return c.most_common()[-1]. Changing this value to any other breaks the code as the least common element is no longer returned. So, what does the -1 mean in this context?

Accepted Answer

One of the neat features of Python lists is that you can index from the end of the list. You can do this by passing a negative number to []. It essentially treats len(array) as the 0th index. So, if you wanted the last element in array, you would call array[-1].

All your return c.most_common()[-1] statement does is call c.most_common and return the last value in the resulting list, which would give you the least common item in that list. Essentially, this line is equivalent to:

temp = c.most_common()
return temp[len(temp) - 1]

Meaning of List[-1] in Python

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Chloe Bennett

Meaning of List[-1] in Python

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Chloe Bennett