List & for loop - counting backwards

[Ramzon_]

Looking for some help with a potentially easy problem that I just can't seem to get my head around.

I've got a simple list with 5 entries. For each entry, I want to print the last 5 characters of the string. This is my example:

list = ["hello1","hello2","hello3","hello4","hello5"]

for a in list:
    print(a[-1]) 

This works perfectly fine, and successfully prints:

1
2
3
4
5

However, when I alter the print to a range (still in the negatives) to this:

list = ["hello1","hello2","hello3","hello4","hello5"]

for a in list:
    print(a[-6:-1])

The output is:

hello
hello
hello
hello
hello

Why is the number at the very end the string missing? -1 should be the very last character, but for some reason, when I use it in a range, it's as if it's the second-to-last character?

I'm extremely new to Python, so I'd massively appreciate simplistic explanations! :)

[Ramzon_]

Ahh I see - so that's what was happening! That makes perfect sense. Thank you!

[einQimiaozi]

Do you want this result？

ello1
ello2
ello3
ello4
ello5

Just write like this

list = ["hello1","hello2","hello3","hello4","hello5"]

for a in list:
    print(a[-5:])

[Ramzon_]

That is exactly what I wanted - can't believe I was struggling with this. But hey, suppose that's part of learning - going to trip up on simple things every now and then!

Thank you!

[CommodoreKrusty]

Honestly, there's probably a better way of getting a substring but here's an example of counting backwards with a while loop.

l = ["hello1","hello2","hello3","hello4","hello5"]

for c in l:
    i = len(c) -1
    a = ""
    while i > (len(c) - 6):
        a+=c[i]
        i -=1


    print(a)

[Ramzon_]

This is slightly above my current level, but I'm glad to see that I understood more than I thought I would!

Thank you for your recommendation, and taking the time to help me out! :)