As a relative new comer to Python, I haven't done a heck of a lot of hacking around with it. I had my first run in with Python's quirky (to me at least) tendency to assign by reference rather than by value (I'm coming from a VBA world so that's the terminology I'm using). I was surprised that these two cases behave so differently
test = [[1],[2]] x = test[0] x[0] = 5 test >>> [[5],[2]] x = 1 test >>>[[5],[2]] x >>> 1 Now I've done a little reading and I think I understand the problem... My issue is, "What's the 'best practise' way of assigning just the value of something to a new name?" i.e. test = [[1,2],[3,4]] I need to do some data manipulation with the first list in the above list without changing <test> obviously x = test[0] will not work as any changes i make will alter the original... I found that I could do this: x = [] + test[0] that gets me a "pure" (i.e. unconnected to test[0] ) list but that concerned me as a bit kludgy Thanks for you time and help. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
