While doing "for x in y" loops I often need to know if I'm working on the first item or the last item in the list. For example imagine you are building a list of values separated by ","s. The last iteration you need to suppress the ",". One work around is to just take the last character off during at the end, but you get the idea. I could see the code looking something like this for item in List: if __first__: print 'we are in the first loop' doSomething() if __last__ is False: print ',' Sorry if the formatting is a little off. Does something like this already exist and I'm just being a newb. I am fairly new to the language. Also it would be nice if there was an auto counter like For item in List with count x . where x would then be an auto counter that incremented every iteration of the loop. Thanks