How do you remove an element from a list without deleting it in Python?

Why use Lists?

Sometimes, there may be situations where you need to handle different types of data at the same time. For example, let’s say, you need to have a string type element, an integer and a floating-point number in the same collection. Now, this is fairly impossible with the default data types that are available in other programming languages like C & C++. In simple words, if you define an array of type integer, you can only store integers in it. This is where Python has an advantage. With its list collection data type, we can store elements of different data types as a single ordered collection!

Table of Contents Show

Why use Lists?
Delete Element From List in Python
Remove an element from List by value using list.remove()
Remove First Element from List in Python

Now that you know how important lists are, let’s move on to see what exactly are Lists and how to remove elements from list!

Delete Element From List in Python

Python Python List

Created: October-12, 2021 | Updated: December-02, 2021

If you are working with the list, and you want to remove an element from the list without making lots of effort and want to save your time, you can use the Python built-in functions to remove that particular element from the list.

In this article, we will learn how to delete an element in a list by value in a very simple way. When we work with list operations, there are times when we need to delete certain elements from the list permanently. Fortunately, Python has many different yet simple and convenient ways to remove those particular elements from the list.

There are various ways to delete or remove the element from the list, for example, remove(), del(), and pop() methods etc.

Remove an element from List by value using list.remove()

Python’s list provides a member function to remove an element from list i.e.

list.remove(value)
It removes the first occurrence of given element from the list.

For example,

Suppose we have a list of numbers i.e.

# List of numbers listOfnum = [12, 44, 56, 45, 34, 3, 56, 4, 33, 44, 56]
Let’s remove 56 from the given list using list.remove() i.e.
# Remove first occurrence of 56 from List listOfnum.remove(56)
It will remove the first occurrence of 56 from the above lists. Lists contents will be now,
[12, 44, 45, 34, 3, 56, 4, 33, 44, 56]
If we try to remove the element that doesn’t exists in list then list.remove() will throw exception.
Therefore before calling list.remove() we should either,

Advertisements

Check if element exists in list i.e.

# Check if element exist in List, before removing if 99 in listOfnum: listOfnum.remove(99) else: print("Given Element Not Found in List")
Or use try / except i.e.
# If given element doesn't exists in list, then remove() can throw Error # Therefore use try / except while calling list.remove() try : listOfnum.remove(99) except ValueError: print("Given Element Not Found in List")
Related Articles

Python: Remove elements from a list while iterating
Python: Remove elements from list by value (first or all occurrences)
Python: Remove elements from list by index or indices

Remove First Element from List in Python

Python lists are one of the most used sequential data structures when it comes to storing and manipulating data easily while programming. Lists are one collection that simplifies the life of programmers to a great extent. However, when it comes to removing items from lists, there are multiple ways in which this can be done. Removing elements is not just a matter of removing a value from a list, but also of making sure that the other elements in the list remain valid. In this article, we will take a look at five different ways that you can use to remove the first element from the lists. But before that, let us take a brief look at the list of data structures in python programming.