how to edit each member of a list in python

Question

I am new to python and I am trying to create a capitalize function that either capitalizes all words in a string or only the first word. Here is my function

def          


        

Answer 1

The bread-and-butter way to do this is to use a list comprehension:

>>> l = ['one', 'two', 'three']
>>> [w.capitalize() for w in l]
['One', 'Two', 'Three']

This creates a copy of the list, with the expression applied to each of the items.

If you don't want to create a copy, you could do this...

>>> for i, w in enumerate(l):
...     l[i] = w.capitalize()
... 
>>> l
['One', 'Two', 'Three']

...or this:

l[:] = (w.capitalize() for w in l)

The latter is probably the most elegant way to alter the list in-place, but note that it uses more temporary storage then the enumerate method.