More and more features of Python move to be "lazy executable", like generator expressions and other kind of iterators. Sometimes, however, I see myself wanting to roll a one liner "for" loop, just to perform some action.
What would be the most pythonic thing to get the loop actually executed?
For example:
a = open("numbers.txt", "w")
(a.write ("%d " % i) for i in xrange(100))
a.close()
Not actuall code, but you see what I mean. If I use a list generator, instead, I have the side effect of creating a N-lenght list filled with "None"'s.
Currently what I do is to use the expression as the argument in a call to "any" or to "all". But I would like to find a way that would not depend on the result of the expression performed in the loop - both "any" and "all" can stop depending on the expression evaluated.
To be clear, these are ways to do it that I already know about, and each one has its drawbacks:
[a.write ("%d " % i) for i in xrange(100))]
any((a.write ("%d " % i) for i in xrange(100)))
for item in (a.write ("%d " % i) for i in xrange(100)): pass
It is 2019 -
and this is a question from 2010 that keeps showing up. A recent thread in one of Python's mailing lists spammed over 70 e-mails on this subject, and they refused again to add a consume call to the language.
On that thread, the most efficient mode to that actually showed up, and it is far from being obvious, so I am posting it as the answer here:
import deque
consume = deque(maxlen=0).extend
And then use the consume callable to process generator expressions.
It turns out the deque native code in cPython actually is optimized for the maxlen=0 case, and will just consume the iterable.
The any and all calls I mentioned in the question should be equally as efficient, but one has to worry about the expression truthiness in order for the iterable to be consumed.
I see this still may be controversial, after all, an explicit two line for loop can handle this - I remembered this question because I just made a commit where I create some threads, start then, and join then back - without a consume callable, that is 4 lines with mostly boiler plate, and without benefiting from cycling through the iterable in native code:
https://github.com/jsbueno/extracontext/blob/a5d24be882f9aa18eb19effe3c2cf20c42135ed8/tests/test_thread.py#L27