I have a list of numbers in Python, and I’m trying to get the sum of only the odd numbers. I know I can use a for loop, but is there a more Pythonic way to do this?
Here’s what I have so far, but it seems a bit long
numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
sum_of_odds = 0
for number in numbers:
if number % 2 != 0:
sum_of_odds += number
print(sum_of_odds)
Typically a generator expression is used instead of a loop when applying a simple expression once:
sum(n for n in numbers if n % 2 == 1)
If you were to operate on the sequence multiple times, you would first transform it with a persistent list comprehension:
odds = [n for n in numbers if n % 2 == 1]
sum(odds)
2
I believe this is a shorter and more “Pythonic” way to do it:
numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
sum_of_odds = sum(number for number in numbers if number % 2 != 0)
print(sum_of_odds)
The use of generator expressions here along with sum() is more efficient (partly because it avoids creating an intermediate list). We then use an inline if-statment (number % 2 != 0) to filter the numbers.