Reverse All Strings in String List in Python

Last Updated : 03 May, 2025

We are given a list of strings and our task is to reverse each string in the list while keeping the order of the list itself unchanged. For example, if we have a list like this: ['gfg', 'is', 'best'] then the output will be ['gfg', 'si', 'tseb'].

Using For Loop

We can use a for loop to iterate over the list and reverse each string. This method is easy to understand and very readable.

Python

a = ["apple", "banana", "cherry", "date"]

res = []

for s in a:
    res.append(s[::-1])

print(res)

Output

['elppa', 'ananab', 'yrrehc', 'etad']

Explanation: We iterate over each string s in list a and reverse it using slicing (s[::-1]), then append the reversed string to res list.

Using List comprehension

List comprehension is a concise and efficient way to reverse all strings in a list. It allows us to iterate over the list and apply a transformation to each element.

Python

a = ["apple", "banana", "cherry", "date"]

res = [s[::-1] for s in a]
print(res)

Output

['elppa', 'ananab', 'yrrehc', 'etad']

Explanation: list comprehension iterates over each string in a and for each string s[::-1] reverses each string.

Using map() Function

map() function provides a way to applying a function to all elements of an iterable. In this case, we can use map() with a lambda function to reverse each string.

Python

a = ["apple", "banana", "cherry", "date"]

res = list(map(lambda s: s[::-1], a))
print(res)

Output

['elppa', 'ananab', 'yrrehc', 'etad']

Explanation:

map() function applies lambda function lambda s: s[::-1] to each string in the list a.
lambda s: s[::-1] reverses each string.
list() function is used to convert the result from a map object into a list.

Reverse Strings Without String Slicing

This method avoids string slicing and instead uses string concatenation to reverse each string in the list. It’s a straightforward way to manually reverse strings using loops

Python

a = ["apple", "banana", "cherry", "date"]
for i in range(len(a)):
    temp = ''
    for ch in a[i]:
        temp = ch + temp
    a[i] = temp

print(a)

Output

['elppa', 'ananab', 'yrrehc', 'etad']

Explanation:

We iterate over each string in the list strings.
For each string, we build its reverse by prepending each character to an empty string temp.
The reversed string replaces the original string in the list.