What are some advanced exercises for practicing Python lists?

What are some advanced exercises for practicing Python lists?

Here are a few advanced exercises you can try:

1. Implement a function to flatten a nested list.
2. Write a program to find the longest consecutive sequence in a list.
3. Create a function that returns the most common element in a list.

Can you explain how to flatten a nested list?

Sure! To flatten a nested list, you can use recursion. Here's a simple function:

def flatten(nested_list):
    flat_list = []
    for item in nested_list:
        if isinstance(item, list):
            flat_list.extend(flatten(item))
        else:
            flat_list.append(item)
    return flat_list

This function checks if an item is a list and flattens it accordingly.

What about finding the longest consecutive sequence?

To find the longest consecutive sequence, you can sort the list and then iterate through it to count consecutive numbers. Here's a sample implementation:

def longest_consecutive(nums):
    if not nums:
        return 0
    nums = sorted(set(nums))
    longest = current = 1
    for i in range(1, len(nums)):
        if nums[i] == nums[i - 1] + 1:
            current += 1
        else:
            longest = max(longest, current)
            current = 1
    return max(longest, current)

Thanks! Can you give me an example of using the most common element function?

Absolutely! You can use the collections.Counter class to find the most common element. Here's how:

from collections import Counter

def most_common_element(lst):
    return Counter(lst).most_common(1)[0][0]

You can call this function with a list, and it will return the most common element.