What will be the output of the code below?

Technology CommunityCategory: PythonWhat will be the output of the code below?
VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago
Problem

Consider:

list = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']
print list[10:]

The above code will output [], and will not result in an IndexError.

As one would expect, attempting to access a member of a list using an index that exceeds the number of members (e.g., attempting to access list[10] in the list above) results in an IndexError. However, attempting to access a slice of a list at a starting index that exceeds the number of members in the list will not result in an IndexError and will simply return an empty list.

What makes this a particularly nasty gotcha is that it can lead to bugs that are really hard to track down since no error is raised at runtime.