Accessing the Index in a `for` Loop in Python

Naveera A.

The Problem

How can you access the index of each element while using Python’s for loop?

Let’s say we have the following list:

directions = ['north', 'east', 'south', 'west']

Usually, we don’t need the indexes of the elements. So Python provides a simpler method of looping where instead of retrieving item indexes and looking up each element, we can just loop over the elements directly, like so:

directions = ['north', 'east', 'south', 'west']

for direction in directions:
    print(direction)

But what if we need the indexes? For example, if we want the following output where each element is printed alongside its index in the list:

0 north
1 east
2 south
3 west

The Solution

Python’s for loops are actually foreach loops. A foreach loop makes the code simpler to read but it maintains no counters. So rather than saying “do this n times”, a foreach loop essentially says “do this to everything in the sequence”.

For scenarios where we actually need the index or counter variable, we can use Python’s built-in enumerate function. The enumerate function returns an iterable. Each element of this iterable is a tuple containing the index of the item and the original item value, like so:

directions = ['north', 'east', 'south', 'west']
directions_tuples = enumerate(directions)

# output [(0, 'north'), (1, 'east'), (2, 'south'), (3, 'west')]

We can unpack the tuple in two variables and use it in the for loop, like so:

directions = ['north', 'east', 'south', 'west']

for index, direction in enumerate(directions):
    print(f"{index} {direction}")

This will print the following output:

0 north
1 east
2 south
3 west

The enumerate function also takes an optional argument, start. We can use this argument to change the starting index. By default, the value of start is 0.

Let’s say we want to print the directions with a natural counting number, we can set the value of start to 1, like so:

directions = ['north', 'east', 'south', 'west']

for index, direction in enumerate(directions, start=1):
    print(f"{index} {direction}")

This time we will get the following output:

1 north
2 east
3 south
4 west

There are other ways of accessing index or counter variables, for example using the range and len functions, like so:

for index in range(len(directions)):
    print(f"{index} {directions[index]}")

But using the enumerate function is the recommended and pythonic way of achieving this result.