Create an empty list in python with certain size

Question

I want to create an empty list (or whatever is the best way) that can hold 10 elements.

After that I want to assign values in that list, for example this is supposed

Answer 1

varunl's currently accepted answer

 >>> l = [None] * 10
 >>> l
 [None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None]

Works well for non-reference types like numbers. Unfortunately if you want to create a list-of-lists you will run into referencing errors. Example in Python 2.7.6:

>>> a = [[]]*10
>>> a
[[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]
>>> a[0].append(0)
>>> a
[[0], [0], [0], [0], [0], [0], [0], [0], [0], [0]]
>>> 

As you can see, each element is pointing to the same list object. To get around this, you can create a method that will initialize each position to a different object reference.

def init_list_of_objects(size):
    list_of_objects = list()
    for i in range(0,size):
        list_of_objects.append( list() ) #different object reference each time
    return list_of_objects


>>> a = init_list_of_objects(10)
>>> a
[[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]
>>> a[0].append(0)
>>> a
[[0], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]
>>> 

There is likely a default, built-in python way of doing this (instead of writing a function), but I'm not sure what it is. Would be happy to be corrected!

Edit: It's [ [] for _ in range(10)]

Example :

>>> [ [random.random() for _ in range(2) ] for _ in range(5)]
>>> [[0.7528051908943816, 0.4325669600055032], [0.510983236521753, 0.7789949902294716], [0.09475179523690558, 0.30216475640534635], [0.3996890132468158, 0.6374322093017013], [0.3374204010027543, 0.4514925173253973]]