Dart| Flutter How to: get First and Last Element from a List with Example

This tutorial shows how to get the first and last element from a Dart or Flutter List

dart programming provides multiple ways to retrieve the first and last element from a list.

How to get the First element in dart/flutter?

dart list provides multiple ways to retrieve the first element.

• List.first property
  • Returns the first element from a given list, if the list is not empty.
  • if the list is empty, It throws an error Uncaught Error: Bad state: No element

import 'dart:async';

void main() async {
  List list = [];
  print(list);//[]
  print(list.first);  // Uncaught Error: Bad state: No element
}

• List index with zero
  • List elements are inserted with insertion order and elements are indexed with 0 to end element with list.length - 1.
  • index=0 is the first element. Elements get using List[index] syntax.
  • If the list is empty, It throws an error Uncaught Error: RangeError (index): Index out of range: no indices are valid: 0

import 'dart:async';

void main() async {
  List list = [];
  print(list);//[]
  print(list[0]); // Uncaught Error: RangeError (index): Index out of range: no indices are valid: 0
}

Here is a Complete code to get the first element from a given list.

import 'dart:async';

void main() async {
  List list = [5, 7, 33, 9];
  print(list);

  print(list.first); // 5
  print(list[0]); // 5
}

How to get the last element from a list in dart and flutter?

dart list provides multiple ways to retrieve the last element.

• List. last property
  • The last element is returned from a given list if the list is not empty.
  • if the list is empty, It throws an error Uncaught Error: Bad state: No element

import 'dart:async';

void main() async {
  List list = [];
  print(list);//[]
  print(list.last);  // Uncaught Error: Bad state: No element
}

• List index with the list.length -1
  • List elements are inserted with insertion order and elements are indexed with 0 to end element with list.length - 1.
  • list.length - 1 is the last element. Elements get using List[index] syntax.
  • If list is empty, calling List[list.length - 1] throws an error Uncaught Error: RangeError (index): Index out of range: index must not be negative: -1

import 'dart:async';

void main() async {
  List list = [];
  print(list);//[]
  print(list[0]); // // Uncaught Error: RangeError (index): Index out of range: index must not be negative: -1
}

First, You have a list is created with initializing syntax.

Here is an example

import 'dart:async';

void main() async {
  List list = [5, 7, 33, 9];
  print(list);

  print(list.last); // 9
  print(list[list.length-1]); // 0
}

Conclusion

To summarize, We can easily get the Last and first elements of a list using first and last and list index syntax.