Nintendo recently announced Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, the Dynasty Warriors-style prequel to The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game is set 100 years prior to the events of Breath of the Wild and allows players to engage in combat that took place during the battle of Hyrule before the great calamity. You can expect some fast-paced action as you cut through vast waves of enemies and in-depth storytelling fans have come to expect from Zelda titles.

Many fan favourite characters are playable in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, such as Link, Zelda, the four champions introduced initially in Breath of the Wild, and the freshly announced young Impa! Nintendo has confirmed the Amiibo set of the four champions will be re-released in time for the release of the new title.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity releases November 20 for Nintendo Switch, and is available to pre-order at $59.99 / £49.99. The pre-order will include a Lucky Ladle as an in-game bonus for Link to use in battle. While you wait for the release, find something to play with help from our list of the best mobile RPGs.

Check out the full Koei Tecmo Tokyo Game Show stream here.

Problem: Given a list. How to access the last element of this list?

Example: You have the list ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Liz'] and you want to get the last element 'Liz'.

Quick solution: Use negative indexing -1.

friends = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Liz']

print(friends[-1])

# Liz

To access the last element of a Python list, use the indexing notation list[-1] with negative index -1 which points to the last list element. To access the second-, third-, and fourth-last elements, use the indices -2, -3, and -4. To access the n last elements of a list, use slicing list[:-n-1:-1] with negative stop index -n and negative step size -1.

Method 1: Access the Last Element with Negative Indexing -1

To bring everybody on the same page, let me quickly explain indices in Python by example. Suppose, you have list ['u', 'n', 'i', 'v', 'e', 'r', 's', 'e']. The indices are simply the positions of the characters of this string.

Positive Index: The first character has index 0, the second character has index 1, and the i-th character has index i-1.

Negative Index: The last character has index -1, the second last character has index -2, and the i-th last character has index -i.

Now, you can understand how to access the last element of the list:

friends = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Liz']

print(friends[-1])

# Liz

But how to access the second-last element? Just use index -2!

friends = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Liz']

print(friends[-2])

# Bob

Method 2: Access the n Last Elements with Slicing

But what if you want to access the n last elements? The answer is slicing.

The default slicing operation list[start:stop:step] accesses all elements between start (included) and stop (excluded) indices, using the given step size over the list. For example, the slicing operation friends[0:3:2] would start with the first element 'Alice' and end with the third element 'Liz' (included), but taking only every second element due to the step size of 2—effectively skipping the second element 'Bob'.

You can use slicing with negative start and stop indices and with negative stop size to slice from the right to the left. To access the n last elements in the slice, you’d therefore use the following code:

universe = ['u', 'n', 'i', 'v', 'e', 'r', 's', 'e'] # Access the n=4 last element from the list:

n = 4

print(universe[:-n-1:-1])

# ['e', 's', 'r', 'e']

There are different points to consider in the code:

• You use a negative step size -1 which means that you slice from the right to the left.
• If you don’t provide a value for start, stop, or step indices, Python takes the default ones. For example, we don’t provide the start index and perform negative slicing so Python starts from the last element 'e'.
• You want to get the n last elements. The n-th last element has index -n. But as the stop index is never included in the slice, we need to slice one step further to the left—to the element with index -n-1 to include the element with index -n.

Try this yourself in our interactive code shell:

Exercise: What happens if the list has less than n characters?

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory, let’s get some practice!

To become successful in coding, you need to get out there and solve real problems for real people. That’s how you can become a six-figure earner easily. And that’s how you polish the skills you really need in practice. After all, what’s the use of learning theory that nobody ever needs?

Practice projects is how you sharpen your saw in coding!

Do you want to become a code master by focusing on practical code projects that actually earn you money and solve problems for people?

Then become a Python freelance developer! It’s the best way of approaching the task of improving your Python skills—even if you are a complete beginner.

Join my free webinar “How to Build Your High-Income Skill Python” and watch how I grew my coding business online and how you can, too—from the comfort of your own home.

Join the free webinar now!

The post How to Get the Last Element of a Python List? first appeared on Finxter.

LEd is a new open source level editor written in the Haxe language by a developer at Motion Twin, using lessons learned creating games such as Dead Cells. LEd is designed to be user friendly and from my experiences it succeeds.

Key details of LEd:

• Easy to use: modern UI with a strong focus on ease-of-use and quality-of-life features.
• Universal and agnostic: compatible with all languages (not only Haxe) and game frameworks in the world
• JSON: easy to parse file format for any game-engine out there (I promise it’s actually really easy). Haxe isn’t required.
• Customizable layers: Integer grid layers, Tile layers and Entity layers support
• Auto-layers: paint your collision map and see the grass, textures and all the small details being drawn automatically!
• Entities: fully customizable Entity with custom properties (ex: you can have a “Mob” entity, with a “hitPoints” field, which is an Integer limited to [0,10] bounds).
• Enums: you can define an enumeration (ex: an “ItemType” enum with “Money”, “Ammo”, “Gun” values) and use this enum in your entity custom fields.
• External enums: enums can be imported and synced directly from Haxe source code files (HX file)!
• HTML5: LEd is built around modern web standards.
• Auto update: you get notified as soon as a stable update is released and it’s up to you to install it when you’re ready, with a single click.
• LEd loves Haxe: a powerful Haxe API which gives you access to fully typed values from your levels. It avoids mistakes like mistyping, renaming or removals: you see errors during compilation, not at runtime.

You can see LEd in action in the video below. The project is open source under the MIT license and hosted on GitHub.

When he’s not paying off a loan to Tom Nook, Liam likes to report on the latest Nintendo news and admire his library of video games. His favourite Nintendo character used to be a guitar-playing dog, but nowadays he prefers to hang out with Judd the cat.