Strange result when removing item from a list while iterating over it

You're modifying the list while you iterate over it. That means that the first time through the loop, i == 1, so 1 is removed from the list. Then the for loop goes to the second item in the list, which is not 2, but 3! Then that's removed from the list, and then the for loop goes on to the third item in the list, which is now 5. And so on. Perhaps it's easier to visualize like so, with a ^ pointing to the value of i:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...]
 ^

That's the state of the list initially; then 1 is removed and the loop goes to the second item in the list:

[2, 3, 4, 5, 6...]
    ^
[2, 4, 5, 6...]
       ^

And so on.

There's no good way to alter a list's length while iterating over it. The best you can do is something like this:

numbers = [n for n in numbers if n >= 20]

or this, for in-place alteration (the thing in parens is a generator expression, which is implicitly converted into a tuple before slice-assignment):

numbers[:] = (n for in in numbers if n >= 20)

If you want to perform an operation on n before removing it, one trick you could try is this:

for i, n in enumerate(numbers):
    if n < 20 :
        print("do something")
        numbers[i] = None
numbers = [n for n in numbers if n is not None]

@senderle's answer is the way to go!

Having said that to further illustrate even a bit more your problem, if you think about it, you will always want to remove the index 0 twenty times:

[1,2,3,4,5............50]
 ^
[2,3,4,5............50]
 ^
[3,4,5............50]
 ^

So you could actually go with something like this:

aList = list(range(50))
i = 0
while i < 20:
    aList.pop(0)
    i += 1

print(aList) #[21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49]

I hope it helps.

---

The ones below are not bad practices AFAIK.

EDIT (Some more):

lis = range(50)
lis = lis[20:]

Will do the job also.

EDIT2 (I'm bored):

functional = filter(lambda x: x> 20, range(50))

Begin at the list's end and go backwards:

li = list(range(1, 15))
print(li)

for i in range(len(li) - 1, -1, -1):
    if li[i] < 6:
        del li[i]
        
print(li)

Result:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14] 
[6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]