I'm not sure if they want odd or even number

Question

It says return even numbers starting at the end of the list, but the example shows odd numbers. Not sure what they want so I tried returning both, but it just tells me try again.

slices.py

def first_4(data):
    return data[:4]
def first_and_last_4(data):
    return data[:4] + data[-4:]
def odds(data):
    return data[1::2]
 def reverse_evens(data):
        return data[::2]

Answer 1 · 2018-12-09T03:01:56Z

December 9, 2018 3:01am

Hi James,

Task 4: Make a function named reverse_evens that accepts a single iterable as an argument. Return every item in the iterable with an even index...in reverse. For example, with [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] as the input, the function would return [5, 3, 1].

While the numbers are odd, they have even indexes in the array.

For an array of: arr = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Its indexes are (as with every array): [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

So the even index are: [0, 2, 4]

Which correspond to the values in arr of: [1, 3, 5]

So the reversed array of even indexes from the original array is: [5, 3, 1]

So we need a function similar to:

def reverse_evens(data):
    return (data[::2])[::-1]

The data[::2] ensures we step over all of the odd numbers, then [::-1] reverses the new list that contains only evens. While data[::-2] would work for the example, it wouldn't work for a list that had one other item, that would instead return all of the odd indexes, hence the 2 step approach.

Cheers,

Eric

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james mchugh

james mchugh

I'm not sure if they want odd or even number

1 Answer

Eric M

Eric M

james mchugh

james mchugh