Consuming the iterator is *necessary* to get the last item. There's no way around that.
Obviously, you could itertools.tee() it first if you don't mind the cache space. But there cannot be a generic "jump to the end" of an iterator without being destructive.
On Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 08:37:07AM -0700, David Mertz wrote:
> Of course. But if you want last(), why not just spell the utility function
> as I did? I.e. as a function:
>
> def last(it):
> for item in it:
> pass
> return item
>
> That works fine for any iteratable (including a list, array, etc), whether
> or not it's a reduction/accumulation.
That's no good, because it consumes the iterator. Yes, you get
the last value, but you actually needed to do work on all the
previous values too.
--
Steve
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