Python | Front and rear range deletion in a list

Sometimes, we require to shrink a list by deletion of its certain elements. One of the methods that is employed to perform this particular task is front and rear element deletion. It is a good utility whose solution can be useful to have. Let’s discuss certain ways in which this can be performed.

Method #1 : Using list slicing + del operator
The del operator can be clubbed with the slicing action to delete the front and rear elements from a list to obtain a cropped version of list.

# Python3 code to demonstrate
# front and rear deletion
# using del operator + list slicing

# initializing list
test_list = [2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 8, 6]

# printing original list
print ("The original list is : " + str(test_list))

# using del operator + list slicing
# front and rear deletion
del test_list[-2:], test_list[:2]

# printing result
print ("The cropped list is : " +  str(test_list))

Output :

The original list is : [2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 8, 6]
The cropped list is : [5, 7, 9, 10]

Method #2 : Using list slicing
Above method can be modified and the use of del operator can be omitted to achieve this particular task. We can slice a list in a way that specific number of elements are removed from the list.

# Python3 code to demonstrate
# front and rear deletion
# using list slicing

# initializing list
test_list = [2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 8, 6]

# printing original list
print ("The original list is : " + str(test_list))

# using list slicing
# front and rear deletion
res = test_list[2 : -2]

# printing result
print ("The cropped list is : " +  str(res))

Output :

The original list is : [2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 8, 6]
The cropped list is : [5, 7, 9, 10]