Adding elements of list into a string

[James Carpenter]

Good day,

I am trying to use a list of integers and strings, take certain elements out, and concatenate them into a string.
i.e.

lista = [0,'f',0,1,1,1,0,'a',8]
split_length = 3
stringa = ''

while split_length >= 0:[INDENT]print 'XX ',[/INDENT][INDENT]for idx in lista:[/INDENT][INDENT][INDENT]stringa = stringa + str(lista[idx]) + ' ',[/INDENT][/INDENT][INDENT]print 'XX'[/INDENT]

What I am wanting this to print would be:
XX 0 f 0 XX

What I am getting is:

XX
Traceback (most recent call last):[INDENT]File "<stdin>", line 4 in <module>[/INDENT]
TypeError: list indices must be integers, not str

Do I need to convert this into tuples of the length desired, or is there a different way?

[Smygis]

I'm not sure what's going on there but I think you should look in to the join attribute of strings as well as slicing.

>>> l=[0,'f',0,1,1,1,0,'a',8]
>>> " ".join([str(i) for i in l[:3]])
'0 f 0'

Its much easier to create a list and then join it together in to a string.

Slicing works as follows sequence[x:y:z] where;
sequence = any list tuple or string
x = the starting element, empty means start of the sequence
y = the end of the slice, empty is the end
z = stepping of the slicing for instance 2 is every other element, not required as it defaults to 1.

example :

>>> l=[0,'f',0,1,1,1,0,'a',8]
>>> l[::-1] #reversing a list
[8, 'a', 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 'f', 0]
>>> l[1:-1:2] #removing the first, last and every other element
['f', 1, 1, 'a']