Convert array to list Python

In this post, you will learn how to convert an array to a list using the Python programming language.

Arrays and lists are the most commonly used data structures in the Python programming language. An array is a container that can hold a fixed number of items, and these items should be of the same type. A list is a sequence of indexed and ordered values. It contains a list of any type of data object with a comma separated and enclosed within a square bracket. In the development process, we may come across a situation where we need to convert an array to a list. Python provides an in-built method tolist(), to convert an array to a list.

If the array is one-dimensional, a list with the array elements is returned, and if the array is multi-dimensional, a nested list is returned.

Converting array to list using numpy tolist() method

We can convert an array to a list of data elements with the help of the ndarray.tolist() method. The numpy ndarray object has a handy tolist() method that can be used to convert the respect numpy array to a list. This method doesn't accept any arguments and returns a copy of the array data as a Python list.

In the given Python program, we have converted the one-dimensional numpy array to a list.

import numpy as np

arr = np.array([2,4,6])
numpy_arr = np.array(arr)

# printing my_array
print("Array - \n")
print(numpy_arr)

# convert array to list
numpy_list = numpy_arr.tolist()
print("List - ",numpy_list)

Array -

[2 4 6]

List -
 [2, 4, 6]

Converting multi-dimensional array to list

In the given example, we have converted a multidimensional array to a list of data elements with the help of the tolist() method.

import numpy as np

arr = np.array([[2,4,6],[3,1,4],[5,3,6]])
numpy_arr = np.array(arr)

# printing my_array
print("Array - \n")
print(numpy_arr)

# convert array to list
numpy_list = numpy_arr.tolist()
print("List - ",numpy_list)

Array -

[[2 4 6]
 [3 1 4]
 [5 3 6]]

List -
 [[2, 4, 6], [3, 1, 4], [5, 3, 6]]

Converting array to list using array class

Here, first we are importing an array class to use an array. Then, we convert an array to a list of data elements with the help of the tolist() method.

import array as arr

# declare array 
x = arr.array ("i", [5, -4, -50, 35, 11])

# declare an empty list 
y = list()
# convert array and assign to the list 
y = x.tolist()

# print list 
print ("Created list : ", y)

Created list :  [5, -4, -50, 35, 11]

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