pythonic way to do something N times without an in

Question

Every day I love python more and more.

Today, I was writing some code like:

for i in xrange(N):
    do_something()

I had to do something N times. But each time didn't depend on the value of i (index variable). I realized that I was creating a variable I never used (i), and I thought "There surely is a more pythonic way of doing this without the need for that useless index variable."

So... the question is: do you know how to do this simple task in a more (pythonic) beautiful way?

Answer 1

Use the _ variable, as I learned when I asked this question, for example:

# A long way to do integer exponentiation
num = 2
power = 3
product = 1
for _ in xrange(power):
    product *= num
print product

Answer 2

since function is first-class citizen, you can write small wrapper (from Alex answers)

def repeat(f, N):
    for _ in itertools.repeat(None, N): f()

then you can pass function as argument.