Slices and Backwards Lists

Question

Here's the question:
You're on fire! Last one and it is, of course, the hardest.
Make a function named reverse_evens that accepts a single iterable as an argument. Return every item in the iterable with an even index...in reverse.
For example, with [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] as the input, the function would return [5, 3, 1].
You can do it!
What am I doing wrong? PLEASE explain step-by-step, I am new to this!
slices.py
def first_4(items):
    for iterables in items:
        return items[0:4]
def first_and_last_4(single_iterable):
    return single_iterable[0:4] + single_iterable[-4:]
def odds(index):
    return index[1::2]
def reverse_evens(single_iterable_2):
    for every_item in single_iterable_2:
        return single_iterable_2[-1:0:-2]

Jeff Muday · Accepted Answer

Try this:
python
def reverse_evens(array):
    return array[0::2][-1::-1]

The first bracketed part gets only the even elements, the last square brackets simply reverses that list.
Below, I do two steps, and explain it a little better with comments.
python
def reverse_evens(items):
    even_items = items[0::2] # start at zero, go to end, using steps of 2
    reverse_even_items = even_items[-1::-1] # start at last element, go backwards using steps of -1
    return reverse_even_items

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Slices and Backwards Lists

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