July 2020
Beginner to intermediate
248 pages
6h 58m
English
Have you ever noticed that many Python objects know how to behave inside of a for loop? That’s not an accident. Iteration is so useful, and so common, that Python makes it easy for an object to be iterable. All it has to do is implement a handful of behaviors, known collectively as the iterator protocol.
In this chapter, we’ll explore that protocol and how we can use it to create iterable objects. We’ll do this in three ways:
We’ll create our own iterators via Python classes, directly implementing the protocol ourselves.
We’ll create generators, objects that implement the protocol, based on something that looks very similar to a function. Not surprisingly, these are known as generator functions.
We’ll also create ...