How to toggle a value in Python

Question

What is the most efficient way to toggle between 0 and 1?

Answer 1

Here is another non intuitive way. The beauty is you can cycle over multiple values and not just two [0,1]

For Two values (toggling)

>>> x=[1,0]
>>> toggle=x[toggle]

For Multiple Values (say 4)

>>> x=[1,2,3,0]
>>> toggle=x[toggle]

I didn't expect this solution to be almost the fastest too

>>> stmt1="""
toggle=0
for i in xrange(0,100):
    toggle = 1 if toggle == 0 else 0
"""
>>> stmt2="""
x=[1,0]
toggle=0
for i in xrange(0,100):
    toggle=x[toggle]
"""
>>> t1=timeit.Timer(stmt=stmt1)
>>> t2=timeit.Timer(stmt=stmt2)
>>> print "%.2f usec/pass" % (1000000 * t1.timeit(number=100000)/100000)
7.07 usec/pass
>>> print "%.2f usec/pass" % (1000000 * t2.timeit(number=100000)/100000)
6.19 usec/pass
stmt3="""
toggle = False
for i in xrange(0,100):
    toggle = (not toggle) & 1
"""
>>> t3=timeit.Timer(stmt=stmt3)
>>> print "%.2f usec/pass" % (1000000 * t3.timeit(number=100000)/100000)
9.84 usec/pass
>>> stmt4="""
x=0
for i in xrange(0,100):
    x=x-1
"""
>>> t4=timeit.Timer(stmt=stmt4)
>>> print "%.2f usec/pass" % (1000000 * t4.timeit(number=100000)/100000)
6.32 usec/pass