Enumerating over list with strings gives wrong results

Question

I was surprised to see that these two don't output the same results. Why is that?

For a list

numbers = ['01', '02', '03']

>>> for val in numbers:
...     print(val)
01
02
03

while

>>> for i, val in numbers:
...     print(val)
1
2
3

Answer 1

You are unintentionally unpacking your string into 2 variables:

a, b = "xy"
print(a)
print(b)

x
y

What you really want is actually enumerate them:

for i, val in enumerate(numbers):
    print(val)

01
02
03