A gnarly little python loop

[Ian Kelly]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 3:58 PM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to pull down tweets with one of the many twitter APIs.  The
> particular one I'm using (python-twitter), has a call:
>
> data = api.GetSearch(term="foo", page=page)
>
> The way it works, you start with page=1.  It returns a list of tweets.
> If the list is empty, there are no more tweets.  If the list is not
> empty, you can try to get more tweets by asking for page=2, page=3, etc.
> I've got:
>
>     page = 1
>     while 1:
>         r = api.GetSearch(term="foo", page=page)
>         if not r:
>             break
>         for tweet in r:
>             process(tweet)
>         page += 1
>
> It works, but it seems excessively fidgety.  Is there some cleaner way
> to refactor this?

I'd do something like this:

def get_tweets(term):
    for page in itertools.count(1):
        r = api.GetSearch(term, page)
        if not r:
            break
        for tweet in r:
            yield tweet

for tweet in get_tweets("foo"):
    process(tweet)