What you have is on the right track.
def dosomething( thelist ):
for element in thelist:
print element
dosomething( ['1','2','3'] )
alist = ['red','green','blue']
dosomething( alist )
Produces the output:
1
2
3
red
green
blue
A couple of things to note given your comment above: unlike in C-family languages, you often don’t need to bother with tracking the index while iterating over a list, unless the index itself is important. If you really do need the index, though, you can use enumerate(list) to get index,element pairs, rather than doing the x in range(len(thelist)) dance.