Different ways of clearing lists

user_101126 0
Viewed 378813

Is there any reason to do anything more complicated than one of these two lines when you want to clear a list in Python?

old_list = []
old_list = list()

The reason I ask is that I just saw this in some running code:

del old_list[ 0:len(old_list) ]
list python
8 Answers

Clearing a list in place will affect all other references of the same list.

For example, this method doesn't affect other references:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3]
>>> b = a
>>> a = []
>>> print(a)
[]
>>> print(b)
[1, 2, 3]

But this one does:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3]
>>> b = a
>>> del a[:]      # equivalent to   del a[0:len(a)]
>>> print(a)
[]
>>> print(b)
[]
>>> a is b
True

You could also do:

>>> a[:] = []
user_1018830

It appears to me that del will give you the memory back, while assigning a new list will make the old one be deleted only when the gc runs.matter.

This may be useful for large lists, but for small list it should be negligible.

Edit: As Algorias, it doesn't matter.

Note that 

del old_list[ 0:len(old_list) ]

is equivalent to

del old_list[:]
user_2896510

There are two cases in which you might want to clear a list:

  1. You want to use the name old_list further in your code;
  2. You want the old list to be garbage collected as soon as possible to free some memory;

In case 1 you just go on with the assigment:

    old_list = []    # or whatever you want it to be equal to

In case 2 the del statement would reduce the reference count to the list object the name old list points at. If the list object is only pointed by the name old_list at, the reference count would be 0, and the object would be freed for garbage collection.

    del old_list
user_851850
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