Most elegant way to modify elements of nested lists in place

Question

I have a 2D list that looks like this:

table = [[\'donkey\', \'2\', \'1\', \'0\'], [\'goat\', \'5\', \'3\', \'2\']]

I want to change the la

Answer 1

I like Shekhar answer a lot.

As a general rule, when writing Python code, if you find yourself writing for i in range(len(somelist)), you're doing it wrong:

• try enumerate if you have a single list
• try zip or itertools.izip if you have 2 or more lists you want to iterate on in parallel

In your case, the first column is different so you cannot elegantly use enumerate:

for row in table:
    for i, val in enumerate(row):
        if i == 0: continue
        row[i] = int(val)