How do I remove the first item from a list?

You can find a short collection of useful list functions here.

list.pop(index)

>>> l = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
>>> l.pop(0)
'a'
>>> l
['b', 'c', 'd']
>>> 

del list[index]

>>> l = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
>>> del l[0]
>>> l
['b', 'c', 'd']
>>> 

These both modify your original list.

Others have suggested using slicing:

  • Copies the list
  • Can return a subset

Also, if you are performing many pop(0), you should look at collections.deque

from collections import deque
>>> l = deque(['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'])
>>> l.popleft()
'a'
>>> l
deque(['b', 'c', 'd'])
  • Provides higher performance popping from left end of the list

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