Introduction to Iterators in Python

Exploration of Python iterators and how they work.

Supporting content for this blog post.

Background

Python provides for loops for looping over a collection of items. Iterators are the supporting concept that makes this work. These example scripts illustrate Python-level details of how this works.

Setup

Requries python3. For convenience, you can create a virtual environment:

$ virtualenv venv -p python3
$ source venv/bin/activate

but stock Python3 is sufficient.

Run

$ python3 <script_name>
# or
(venv) $ python <script_name>