Given a list I would like a way to explore its contents.
len() will give me the number of items in the list but how I could go further than that? E.g. get information about the classes of the objects contained in the list and their size?
This is a rather general question. If you feel I should produce some concrete example let me know.
If you want to know the available attributes and methods of a list, you can print the online help:
help(list)
If you want the documentation of a method, you can do, for instance:
help(list.append)
If you want the number of items you can use Len function:
l = [True, None, "Hi", 5, 3.14]
print("Length of the list is {0}".format(len(l)))
# -> Length of the list is 5
If you want the memory size of your list reference, you can try sys.getsizeof function:
import sys
print(sys.getsizeof(l))
# -> 104
For the memory size of the items, just sum the individual sizes:
print(sum(sys.getsizeof(i) for i in l))
# -> 147
To list the type of each item, use the type function:
for item in l:
print(type(item))
You get:
<class 'bool'>
<class 'NoneType'>
<class 'str'>
<class 'int'>
<class 'float'>