Is safe ( documented behaviour? ) to delete the domain of an iterator in execution

Posted by PoorLuzer on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by PoorLuzer
Published on 2010-06-03T11:12:22Z Indexed on 2010/06/03 11:34 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 188

I wanted to know if is safe ( documented behaviour? ) to delete the domain space of an iterator in execution in Python.

Consider the code:

import os
import sys

sampleSpace = [ x*x for x in range( 7 ) ]

print sampleSpace

for dx in sampleSpace:

    print str( dx )

    if dx == 1:

        del sampleSpace[ 1 ]
        del sampleSpace[ 3 ]

    elif dx == 25:

        del sampleSpace[ -1 ]

print sampleSpace

'sampleSpace' is what I call 'the domain space of an iterator' ( if there is a more appropriate word/phrase, lemme know ).

What I am doing is deleting values from it while the iterator 'dx' is running through it.

Here is what I expect from the code :

Iteration versus element being pointed to (*):

0: [*0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36]
1: [0, *1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36] ( delete 2nd and 5th element after this iteration )
2: [0, 4, *9, 25, 36]
3: [0, 4, 9, *25, 36] ( delete -1th element after this iteration )
4: [0, 4, 9, 25*] ( as the iterator points to nothing/end of list, the loop terminates )

.. and here is what I get:

[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36]
0
1
9
25
[0, 4, 9, 25]

As you can see - what I expect is what I get - which is contrary to the behaviour I have had from other languages in such a scenario.

Hence - I wanted to ask you if there is some rule like "the iterator becomes invalid if you mutate its space during iteration" in Python?

Is it safe ( documented behaviour? ) in Python to do stuff like this?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about python

Related posts about iteration