Idiom for consecutive loops?

[Alex Martelli]

"Harald Kirsch" <kirschh at lionbioscience.com> wrote in message
news:yv2wv4hqtkw.fsf at lionsp093.lion-ag.de...
"""
When programming in C I find myself writing consecutive loops like

  for(i=0; i<lastI; i++) {
    justDoIt(i);
    if( someTest(i) ) break;
  }
  /* the next loop continues were the last one stopped */
  for(/**/; i<lastI; i++) {
    doSomethingElse(i);
  }

The nice thing is that this is safe even if someTest never becomes
true in the first loop.

How would I do that in python, in particular when looping over list
elements rather than just over numbers.

  Harald Kirsch
P.S.: Please no `while 1:' solutions. I hate them.
"""
No problem, since the closest Python transliteration of your idiom is:

i = 0
while i<lastI:
    justDoIt(i)
    if someTest(i): break
    i += 1
while i<lastI:
    doSomethingElse(i)
    i += 1

nary a "while 1:" in sight:-).

There are more Pythonic idioms, slightly farther from C but OK; my
personal favorite would be:

for i in range(lastI):
    justDoIt(i)
    if someTest(i): break
for i in range(i,lastI):
    doSomethingElse(i)

You can use xrange instead of range if lastI is a BIG number, but
I'll confess I don't normally bother even thinking about that:-).


Alex