for loop without variable

[Basilisk96]

On Jan 9, 10:55 pm, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-s... at benfinney.id.au>
wrote:
> erik gartz <eegun... at yahoo.com> writes:
> > The loop performs some actions with web services. The particular
> > iteration I'm on isn't important to me. It is only important that I
> > attempt the web services that number of times. If I succeed I
> > obviously break out of the loop and the containing function (the
> > function which has the loop in it) returns True. If all attempts
> > fail the containing loop returns False.
>
> When you have iteration requirements that don't seem to fit the
> built-in types (lists, dicts, generators etc.), turn to 'itertools'
> <URL:http://www.python.org/doc/lib/module-itertools> in the standard
> library.
>
>     >>> from itertools import repeat
>
>     >>> def foo():
>     ...     import random
>     ...     print "Trying ..."
>     ...     success = random.choice([True, False])
>     ...     return success
>     ...
>     >>> max_attempts = 10
>     >>> for foo_attempt in repeat(foo, max_attempts):
>     ...     if foo_attempt():
>     ...         break
>     ...
>     Trying ...
>     Trying ...
>     Trying ...
>     Trying ...
>     Trying ...
>     Trying ...
>     >>>
>
> Note that this is possibly more readable than 'for foo_attempt in
> [foo] * max_attempts", and is more efficient for large values of
> 'max_attempts' because 'repeat' returns an iterator instead of
> actually allocating the whole sequence.
>
> > I guess based on the replies of everyone my best bet is to leave the
> > code the way it is and suck up the warning from pylint.
>
> I think your intent -- "repeat this operation N times" -- is better
> expressed by the above code, than by keeping count of something you
> don't actually care about.
>
> > I don't want to turn the warning off because catching unused
> > variables in the general is useful to me.
>
> Agreed.
>
> --
>  \             "Dyslexia means never having to say that you're ysror." |
>   `\                                                        --anonymous |
> _o__)                                                                  |
> Ben Finney

Neat! That is the best solution I've seen so far. I should definitely
dig into the itertools module more often.

Cheers,
-Basilisk96