Get first character of each string in List in Python

This tutorial will discuss about unique ways to get first character of each string in list in Python.

Table Of Contents

Method 1: Using map() method

In this solution, we are assuming that your list has string elements only.

Create a lambda function, that accept a string as argument, and returns the first character of that string. Using map() method, apply this lambda function on each element of list and store the returned characters in a mapped object. Then create a list from all those characters in the mapped object. Basically this list will have the first character of each string in List.

Let’s see the complete example,

listOfStrs = ['This', 'is', 'a', 'sample', 'string']

# Apply a lambda function on each element of string
# to fetch first character of each string
charList = list(map(lambda elem: elem[0], listOfStrs))

print(charList)

Output

['T', 'i', 'a', 's', 's']

Method 2: Using List comprehension and isinstance()

What if list has some non string values too? In that case we want to get a list of first characters of string elements from list only. We can skip the non string elements. For that, we can iterate over all elements of list, using a List comprehension and select first character from only string elements. It will return a list of first character of each string in List.

To check if an element is of string type or not, we have used the isinstance() method.

Let’s see the complete example,

listOfStrs = ['This', 'is', 'a', 56, 'sample', 'string']

# Select first character of string elements from list
charList = [elem[0] for elem in listOfStrs if isinstance(elem, str)]

print(charList)

Output

['T', 'i', 'a', 's', 's']

Method 3: Using for-loop

This is exactly similar to previous solution, but we have used the for-loop instead of List comprehension to select first character from each string in list.

Let’s see the complete example,

listOfStrs = ['This', 'is', 'a', 56, 'sample', 'string']

charList = []

# Select first character of string
# elements from the list
for elem in listOfStrs:
    if isinstance(elem, str):
        charList.append(elem[0])

print(charList)

Output

['T', 'i', 'a', 's', 's']

Summary

We learned about different ways to access the first character of each string in a List in Python. Thanks.