is there an alternative way of calling next on python generators?

Question

I have a generator and I would like to know if I can use it without having to worry about StopIteration , and I would like to use it without the for item in generator . I would like to use it with a while statement for example ( or other constructs ). How could I do that ?

Answer 1

Use this to wrap your generator:

class GeneratorWrap(object):

      def __init__(self, generator):
          self.generator = generator

      def __iter__(self):
          return self

      def next(self):
          for o in self.generator:
              return o
          raise StopIteration # If you don't care about the iterator protocol, remove this line and the __iter__ method.

Use it like this:

def example_generator():
    for i in [1,2,3,4,5]:
        yield i

gen = GeneratorWrap(example_generator())
print gen.next()  # prints 1
print gen.next()  # prints 2

Update: Please use the answer below because it is much better than this one.