Grabbing previous iteration in a dict

[dannywebster]

Hello all,

I have a dictionary of which i'm itervalues'ing through, and i'll be
performing some logic on a particular iteration when a condition is
met with trusty .startswith('foo'). I need to grab the previous
iteration if this condition is met. I can do something with an extra
var to hold every iteration while iterating, but this is hacky and not
elegant.

Is there a mechanism whereby I can just index the dict value
subscripts like in an array? I could just rewind by 1 if so.

Cheerz

dan.

[Paul Hankin]

On May 9, 10:10*am, [e-mail] wrote:

Hello all,

I have a dictionary of which i'm itervalues'ing through, and i'll be
performing some logic on a particular iteration when a condition is
met with trusty .startswith('foo'). *I need to grab the previous
iteration if this condition is met. *I can do something with an extra
var to hold every iteration while iterating, but this is hacky and not
elegant.

Often when you're iterating, 'hacky' code can be lifted out into a
separate generator, keeping the details of the hacks nicely away from
your code. That's true here...

def iterprevious(seq):
"""Generate pairs of (previous element, current element)
from seq."""
last = None
for x in iter(seq):
yield last, x
last = x

Then, when you want use it...

for previous, (key, value) in iterprevious(d.iteritems()):
... In the loop, previous will either be None if we're on the
first element, otherwise (previous_key, previous_value).

--
Paul Hankin

[dannywebster]

On May 9, 4:09 pm, Paul Hankin <[e-mail]:

On May 9, 10:10 am, [e-mail] wrote:

Hello all,

I have a dictionary of which i'm itervalues'ing through, and i'll be
performing some logic on a particular iteration when a condition is
met with trusty .startswith('foo'). I need to grab the previous
iteration if this condition is met. I can do something with an extra
var to hold every iteration while iterating, but this is hacky and not
elegant.

Often when you're iterating, 'hacky' code can be lifted out into a
separate generator, keeping the details of the hacks nicely away from
your code. That's true here...

def iterprevious(seq):
"""Generate pairs of (previous element, current element)
from seq."""
last = None
for x in iter(seq):
yield last, x
last = x

Then, when you want use it...

for previous, (key, value) in iterprevious(d.iteritems()):
... In the loop, previous will either be None if we're on the
first element, otherwise (previous_key, previous_value).

--
Paul Hankin

Hi all - some good stuff here. Thanks for the info, I have a few
ideas
to play with.

thanks again

dan.