Hello everyone, welcome back toProgramming In Python! Here I am going to explain to you how to implement a linear search algorithm in Python. This linear search is a basic search algorithm that searches all the elements in the list and finds the required value. This is also known as a sequential search.
Here in this technique, I compare each and every element with the key element to be found, if both of them match, the algorithm returns that element is found and its position.
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Code Visualization – Linear Search Algorithm
Time Complexity
Best Case | O(1) |
Average Case | O(n) |
Worst Case | O(n) |
Algorithm
Given a listL
of `n` elements with values or records,L0 ... Ln-1
and key/target elementK
, linear search is used to find the index/position of the targetK
in list L
- Initialize a boolean variable
found
and set it to False initially - Start for loop with
i
ranging from 0 to the length of the list - Check if key element is equal to
L[i]
- if equals
- set
found
boolean variable to `True` - print the position of the element found
- break for loop
- set
- if equals
- If the boolean variable
found
is equal toFalse
after for loop, print that the element is not found in the list
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Program
__author__ = 'Avinash'lst = []num = int(input("Enter size of list: \t"))for n in range(num): numbers = int(input("Enter any number: \t")) lst.append(numbers)x = int(input("\nEnter number to search: \t"))found = Falsefor i in range(len(lst)): if lst[i] == x: found = True print("\n%d found at position %d" % (x, i)) breakif not found: print("\n%d is not in list" % x)
Output

Know about one more search algorithm calledBinary Search, you can learn about ithere.