Multiply each element in a list by a number in Python

Multiply each element in a list by a number in Python #

To multiply each element in a list by a number:

1. Use a list comprehension to iterate over the list.
2. On each iteration, multiply the current element by the number.
3. The new list will contain the multiplication results.

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my_list = [2, 4, 6]

result = [item * 10 for item in my_list]

print(result)  # 👉️ [20, 40, 60]

We used a list comprehension to iterate over the list and multiplied each list item by 10.

On each iteration, we multiply the current list item by the specified number and return the result.

Alternatively, you can use a simple for loop.

To multiply each element in a list by a number:

1. Declare a new variable that stores an empty list.
2. Use a for loop to iterate over the original list.
3. On each iteration, multiply the current list item by the number.
4. Append the result to the new list.

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my_list = [2, 4, 6]

result = []

for item in my_list:
    result.append(item * 10)

print(result)

The for loop works in a very similar way to the list comprehension, but instead of returning the list items directly, we append them to a new list.

You can also use the map() function to multiply each element in a list.

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my_list = [2, 4, 6]

result = list(map(lambda item: item * 10, my_list))

print(result)  # 👉️ [20, 40, 60]

The map() function takes a function and an iterable as arguments and calls the function with each item of the iterable.

The last step is to use the list() class to convert the map object to a list.

If you work with numpy arrays, you can directly use the multiplication operator on the array to multiply each of its elements by a number.

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import numpy as np


arr = np.array([2, 4, 6])

result = arr * 10

print(result)  # 👉️ [20 40 60]

Note that this only works with numpy arrays. If you multiply a python list by a number, it gets repeated N times.

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print([2, 4, 6] * 2) # 👉️ [2, 4, 6, 2, 4, 6]

Multiplying a Python list by N, returns a new list containing the elements of the original list repeated N times.