Calculate the average of list of numbers in python
problem
You are learning programming using Python and wish to calculate the average (median) value of a list of numbers. In this post we will see how to calculate it.
SOLUTION
In order to calculate the average of numbers we first need to calculate the total (sum) and then divide that by how many numbers exist in the list.
The quickest way is by using two built-in functions, the sum() to calculate the total and the len() that counts elements in a list.
For example:
numbers = [3,4,5,1,8,9,100,7]
total = sum(numbers)
count = len(numbers)
average = total / count
print(average)
running
python3 average.py
or copy – paste the code in the shell
output
Another one way is by calculating the sum using a for loop.
For example:
numbers = [3,4,5,1,8,9,100,7]
total = 0
count = 0
for num in numbers:
total = total + num
count = count + 1
average = total / count
print(average)
running
python3 average2.py
output
conclusion
In this post we saw two ways for calculating the average of a list of numbers in Python.
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Ellion
Professional IT consultant, writer, programmer enthusiast interested in all sorts of coding.
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