> But as soon as I introduce the [0], in an attempt to access the first > element of each sublist, I get the first sublist in its entirety: > >>>> aList[:][0] > [1, 1, 1]
aList[:] is the shorthand way of taking a copy of aList thus aList[:][0] is the same as saying aList[0] except you get a new item. Thus you could change the content of this version of [1,1,1] without affecting the original. Handy, but not what you want. I don't know any easy way of getting the first items except maybe a list comprehension: [lst[0] for lst in aList] You could turn that into a parameterised function def getRow(n): return [lst[n] for lst in aList] Does that help? Alan G Author of the learn to program web tutor http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
