Itertools
Discover how to use Python's itertools library to simplify iteration tasks. Understand infinite iterators like count, repeat, and cycle, and learn functions like zip_longest, starmap, filterfalse, and combinations to enhance your functional programming skills.
We'll cover the following...
We have mentioned several libraries in other sections of this course. This chapter tells you where to find them and lists further areas to explore.
itertools
itertools is a standard Python library – it is part of Python and doesn’t need any extra installation.
It contains a number of useful extra functions for iteration. Here are some of the highlights; refer to the documentation on python.org for a full list.
Infinite iterators
These are iterators that go on forever.
count
count(start, [step]) produces an infinite series of incrementing values with an initial start value.
For example:
count(0) # Creates 0, 1, 2 ...
It behaves like range but with the end ...