Index all *except* one item in python

For a list, you could use a list comp. For example, to make b a copy of a without the 3rd element:

a = range(10)[::-1]                       # [9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0]
b = [x for i,x in enumerate(a) if i!=3]   # [9, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0]

This is very general, and can be used with all iterables, including numpy arrays. If you replace [] with (), b will be an iterator instead of a list.

Or you could do this in-place with pop:

a = range(10)[::-1]     # a = [9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0]
a.pop(3)                # a = [9, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0]

In numpy you could do this with a boolean indexing:

a = np.arange(9, -1, -1)     # a = array([9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0])
b = a[np.arange(len(a))!=3]  # b = array([9, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0])

which will, in general, be much faster than the list comprehension listed above.


The simplest way I found was:

mylist[:x] + mylist[x+1:]

that will produce your mylist without the element at index x.

Example

mylist = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
x = 3
mylist[:x] + mylist[x+1:]

Result produced

mylist = [0, 1, 2, 4, 5]

>>> l = range(1,10)
>>> l
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>> l[:2] 
[1, 2]
>>> l[3:]
[4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>> l[:2] + l[3:]
[1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>> 

See also

Explain Python's slice notation


If you are using numpy, the closest, I can think of is using a mask

>>> import numpy as np
>>> arr = np.arange(1,10)
>>> mask = np.ones(arr.shape,dtype=bool)
>>> mask[5]=0
>>> arr[mask]
array([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9])

Something similar can be achieved using itertools without numpy

>>> from itertools import compress
>>> arr = range(1,10)
>>> mask = [1]*len(arr)
>>> mask[5]=0
>>> list(compress(arr,mask))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9]