Indexing with modulus

Let’s generate a list of numbers from 1 to 6:

numbers = list(range(1, 7))
print(numbers)

This will print:

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

Now let’s generate a new list of numbers that has a length of 25 and gets its numbers from the list above:

more_numbers = []

for i in range(25):
    next_number = numbers[i % len(numbers)]
    more_numbers.append(next_number)

print(more_numbers)

This will print:

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

Notice that we use range(25) to append to more_numbers 25 times. Then we use i % len(numbers) to get an index that will loop through the numbers and wrap back to the beginning as needed. Because numbers has a length of 6, The variable i will take the values 0 1 2 3 4 5 and then 0 1 2 3 4 5 and so forth.