Recursive list comprehension

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Adam DePrince <adam at cognitcorp.com> wrote:
>  def flatten( i ):
>      try:
>          i = i.__iter__()
>          while 1:
>              j = flatten( i.next() )
>              try:
>                  while 1:
>                      yield j.next()
>              except StopIteration:
>                  pass
>      except AttributeError:
>          yield i

Hmm, there is more to that than meets the eye!  I was expecting

  print list(flatten("hello"))

to print

  ['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']

But it didn't, it printed

  ['hello']

With a little more investigation I see that str has no __iter__
method.  However you can call iter() on a str

>>> for c in iter("hello"): print c
... 
h
e
l
l
o

Or even

>>> for c in "hello": print c
... 
h
e
l
l
o

...and this works because str supports __getitem__ according to the
docs.

So there is some magic going on here!  Is str defined to never have an
__iter__ method?  I see no reason why that it couldn't one day have an
__iter__ method though.

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick