according to answer to this question, yield break in C# is equivalent to return in python. in normal case, 'return' indeed stop a generator. But if your function does nothing but return, you will get a None not an empty iterator, which is returned by yield break in C#
def generate_nothing():
return
for i in generate_nothing():
print i
you will get a TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable.
but if I add an never run yield before return, this function return what I expect.
def generate_nothing():
if False: yield None
return
if works but seems wired. Who has better idea?
thanks,
def generate_nothing():
return
yield
A good way to handle this is raising StopIteration which is what is raised when your iterator has nothing left to yield and next()
is called. This will also gracefully break out of a for loop with nothing inside the loop executed.
For example, given a tuple (0, 1, 2, 3)
I want to get overlapping pairs ((0, 1), (1, 2), (2, 3))
. I could do it like so:
def pairs(numbers):
if len(numbers) < 2:
raise StopIteration
for i, number in enumerate(numbers[1:]):
yield numbers[i], number
Now pairs
safely handles lists with 1 number or less.
def generate_nothing():
return iter([])
The funny part is that both functions have the same bytecode. Probably there's a flag that sets to generator
when bytecode compiler finds the yield
keyword.
>>> def f():
... return
>>> def g():
... if False: yield
#in Python2 you can use 0 instead of False to achieve the same result
>>> from dis import dis
>>> dis(f)
2 0 LOAD_CONST 0 (None)
3 RETURN_VALUE
>>> dis(g)
2 0 LOAD_CONST 0 (None)
3 RETURN_VALUE