Essential Books

Infinite sequences

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Generators can be used to represent infinite sequences: 

def integers_starting_from(n):
    while True:
        yield n
        n += 1

natural_numbers = integers_starting_from(1)

Infinite sequence of numbers as above can also be generated with the help of itertools.count. The above code could be written as below 

natural_numbers = itertools.count(1)

You can use generator comprehensions on infinite generators to produce new generators: 

multiples_of_two = (x * 2 for x in natural_numbers)
multiples_of_three = (x for x in natural_numbers if x % 3 == 0)

Be aware that an infinite generator does not have an end, so passing it to any function that will attempt to consume the generator entirely will have dire consequences: 

list(multiples_of_two)  # will never terminate, or raise an OS-specific error

Instead, use list/set comprehensions with range (or xrange for python < 3.0): 

first_five_multiples_of_three = [next(multiples_of_three) for _ in range(5)] 
# [3, 6, 9, 12, 15]

or use itertools.islice() to slice the iterator to a subset: 

from itertools import islice
multiples_of_four = (x * 4 for x in integers_starting_from(1))
first_five_multiples_of_four = list(islice(multiples_of_four, 5))
# [4, 8, 12, 16, 20]

Note that the original generator is updated too, just like all other generators coming from the same “root”: 

next(natural_numbers)    # yields 16
next(multiples_of_two)   # yields 34
next(multiples_of_four)  # yields 24

An infinite sequence can also be iterated with a for-loop. Make sure to include a conditional break statement so that the loop would terminate eventually: 

for idx, number in enumerate(multiplies_of_two):
    print(number)
    if idx == 9:
        break  # stop after taking the first 10 multiplies of two

Classic example - Fibonacci numbers 

import itertools

def fibonacci():
    a, b = 1, 1
    while True:
        yield a
        a, b = b, a + b

first_ten_fibs = list(itertools.islice(fibonacci(), 10))
# [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55]

def nth_fib(n):
    return next(itertools.islice(fibonacci(), n - 1, n))

ninety_nineth_fib = nth_fib(99)  # 354224848179261915075
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Generators:
* Generators
* Introduction
* Infinite sequences
* Sending objects to a generator
* Yielding all values from another iterable
* Iteration
* The next function
* Coroutines
* Refactoring list-building code
* Yield with recursion recursively listing all files in a directory
* Generator expressions
* Using a generator to find Fibonacci Numbers
* Searching
* Iterating over generators in parallel
* Chaining multiple iterators together
Table Of Contents
0 Getting Started
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123 Websockets
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159 base64 module
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164 Input Subset and Output External Data Files using Pandas
165 hashlib
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170 configparser
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172 Optical Character Recognition OCR
173 Python Data Types
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177 Functional Programming
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181 virtualenvwrapper on Windows
182 Python Requests Post
183 Plotting with Matplotlib
184 Python Lex-Yacc
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186 shelve
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188 Writing to CSV from String or List
189 Raise Custom Errors Exceptions
190 Using loops within functions
191 Contributors