A gnarly little python loop

[Stefan Behnel]

Steve Howell, 11.11.2012 04:03:
> On Nov 10, 2:58 pm, Roy Smith <r... 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 think your code is perfectly readable and clean, but you can flatten
> it like so:
> 
>     def get_tweets(term, get_page):
>         page_nums = itertools.count(1)
>         pages = itertools.imap(api.getSearch, page_nums)
>         valid_pages = itertools.takewhile(bool, pages)
>         tweets = itertools.chain.from_iterable(valid_pages)
>         return tweets

I'd prefer the original code ten times over this inaccessible beast.

Stefan