Welcome back for Unit 3.
This unit introduces the next big idea we need for a web crawler,
which is structured data.
And by the end of this unit you will have finished building a working web crawler.
The closest thing we've seen so far to structured data
is the string data type introduced in Unit 1 and used
in many of the procedures in Unit 2.
A string is a kind of structured data, and that's because
we can break it down into its characters.
The string has a sequence of characters,
and we can operate on sub sequences of the string.
What we could do with strings was somewhat limited, though,
because the only thing we can put in a string is a character.
Today, we're going to introduce the list data type,
and lists are much more powerful than strings,
so whereas for a string, all of the elements had to be characters,
in a list, the elements can be anything we want.
They could be characters. They could be strings.
They could be numbers. They could also be other lists.
Let's look at an example.
When we created a string, we just put a sequence of characters
surrounded by either single or double quotes.
Here's an example of a string,
and we could store that string in a variable by using an assignment.
With a list, instead of using quotes to identify the list
we use square brackets, and the elements are separated by commas.
And just like with a string, we can assign the list that we created
to a variable, so we'll store that list in the variable "p."
With a string, we could use the square brackets
to select elements, and when we index element 0,
we'll get the first element of the string, a sequence of that character,
which is the character "y."
With lists, we can also use square brackets to access elements,
so if we do p[0],
that will evaluate to the first element of p,
which is the string containing the single letter y.
With strings, we saw that we could use the colon inside the square brackets
to select a sub string of more than 1 character.
Here we're selecting from position 2 through position 4.
That will give us the third and fourth characters of the string,
which is the sub sequence, the string "bb."
We can do the same thing with lists.
We can select from position 2 to position 4,
but instead of returning a string, it will return a list
containing those elements.
It will give us a list of the third and fourth element
of the variable p, which is the list that we have here.
The general grammar for constructing a list
is to have a square bracket followed by a list
of any number of expressions where the expressions
are separated by commas.
We could create a list using just 2 brackets,
a left bracket and a right bracket, and this would create a list
containing 0 elements, also known as the empty list.
We could create a list containing 1 element.
That would be the square brackets with 1 element between them.
Here we've created a list containing just 1 element,
which is the number 3.
Or we could create a list with many elements, as we did in the first example,
where we have all of the strings separated by commas.