What does the line del taglist[:] do in the code below?

import urllib from bs4 import BeautifulSoup taglist=list() url=raw_input("Enter URL: ") count=int(raw_input("Enter count:")) position=int(raw_input("Enter position:")) for i in range(count): print "Retrieving:",url html=urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup=BeautifulSoup(html) tags=soup('a') for tag in tags: taglist.append(tag) url = taglist[position-1].get('href', None) del taglist[:] print "Retrieving:",url

The question is "write a Python program that expands on . The program will use urllib to read the HTML from the data files below, extract the href= vaues from the anchor tags, scan for a tag that is in a particular position relative to the first name in the list, follow that link and repeat the process a number of times and report the last name you find". Sample problem: Start at Find the link at position 3 (the first name is 1). Follow that link. Repeat this process 4 times. The answer is the last name that you retrieve. Sequence of names: Fikret Montgomery Mhairade Butchi Anayah Last name in sequence: Anayah

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1 Answer

[:] is the array slice syntax for every element in the array.

This answer here goes more in depth of the general uses: Explain Python's slice notation

del arr # Deletes the array itself del arr[:] # Deletes all the elements in the array del arr[2] # Deletes the second element in the array del arr[1:] # etc..
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