Accessing non-consecutive elements of a list or string in python

Question

As far as I can tell, this is not officially not possible, but is there a \"trick\" to access arbitrary non-sequential elements of a list by slicing?

For example:

Answer 1

If you can use numpy, you can do just that:

>>> import numpy
>>> the_list = numpy.array(range(0,101,10))
>>> the_indices = [2,5,7]
>>> the_subset = the_list[the_indices]
>>> print the_subset, type(the_subset)
[20 50 70] 
>>> print list(the_subset)
[20, 50, 70]

numpy.array is very similar to list, just that it supports more operation, such as mathematical operations and also arbitrary index selection like we see here.