Viraj's Weblog

I'm reading Core Python Programming 2nd Ed. I sometimes like reading the basic intro chapters even though I have a bit of familiarity with Python. There is always something that I may have missed, and each author has a different writing style which is entertaining to read.

I just found out about the enumerate() builtin. How many times have you done this?

>>> f=['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
>>> for i in range(len(f)):
...   print f[i]
... 
foo
bar
baz

Well you can use enumerate() to have both the index and the value:

>>> f=['foo','bar','baz']
>>> for i, val in enumerate(f):
...   print i, val
... 
0 foo
1 bar
2 baz

Cleaner and no array indexing needed. Oh and how about the Zen of Python?

>>> import this