Remove the first element from a list in Python

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to remove the first element from a list in Python.

To remove the first element from a list, we can use the pop() method by passing the index 0 as an argument.

Here is an example, that removes the first element 'bmw' from the following list.

cars = ['bmw', 'benz', 'skoda']
cars.pop(0)

print(cars)

Output:

['benz', 'skoda']

Similarly, we can also use the del statement with slice notation [0] to remove the first element of a list.

cars = ['bmw', 'benz', 'skoda']

del cars[0]

print(cars); # ['benz', 'skoda']

These above methods modify the original list. If you want to keep your original list untouched and create a new array by removing the first element you can use the following slice notation.

cars = ['bmw', 'benz', 'skoda']

print(cars[1:]) # ['benz', 'skoda']

print(cars) # ['bmw', 'benz', 'skoda']