This Tutorial Will Helps You Know the Easy Way to Find Out The Sum of a List of Numbers Using Python

The list data structure is very useful, but if you want to know its sum, it can be complex. Python provides an easy way to do this using built-in function sum() and the + operator. …

Updated November 30, 2023

The list data structure is very useful, but if you want to know its sum, it can be complex. Python provides an easy way to do this using built-in function sum() and the + operator.

Getting the Sum of a List in Python

Python makes it quite straightforward to find out the total (sum) of all elements within a list. This is done by the built-in sum function or by adding all elements together using the + operator.

Using Built-in Function sum() The sum function returns a number representing the sum of all items in an iterable (like a list) in Python. Here’s how you would do it:

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
total = sum(numbers)
print(total)

The above code will output 15 as the total of all numbers in the list.

Using + operator The plus (+) operator works by adding up all values in a sequence (like a list or a tuple). Here’s an example:

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
total = 0
for number in numbers:
    total += number
print(total)

The above code does the same as the first one. It adds up all the elements in a list (or tuple or any iterable), and prints out the result.

In both cases, the built-in sum function and the + operator are much more efficient than manually looping over the list to add up its elements, as they can take advantage of Python’s ability to perform operations on entire arrays at once.

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