Python: clear items from PriorityQueue

Question

Clear all items from the queue

I read the above answer

Im using python 2.7

import Queue
pq = Queue.PriorityQueue()
pq.clear()

I get the following error:

AttributeError: PriorityQueue instance has no attribute 'clear'

Is there way to easily empty priority queue instead of manually popping out all items? or would re-instantiating work (i.e. it wouldn't mess with join())?

Answer 1

It's actually pq.queue.clear(). However, as mentioned in the answers to the question you referenced, this is not documented and potentially unsafe.

The cleanest way is described in this answer:

while not q.empty():
    try:
        q.get(False)
    except Empty:
        continue
    q.task_done()

Re-instantiating the queue would work too of course (the object would simple be removed from memory), as long as no other part of your code holds on to a reference to the old queue.