newbie idiom question

[Michael Hudson]

Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> writes:

> Something I keep getting tripped up about is that objects being
> iterated in "for" statements cannot be modified.
> 
> I keep trying to do this:
> 
>       >>> eggs = [1,2,3]
>       >>> for spam in eggs:
>       ...	spam = 'cooked'
>       ...
>       >>> eggs
>       [1, 2, 3]
>       >>> 
> 
> The tutorial says this:
> 
>       If you need to modify the list you are iterating over, e.g., duplicate
>       selected items, you must iterate over a copy. The slice notation makes
>       this particularly convenient:
> 
>       >>> for x in a[:]: # make a slice copy of the entire list
>       ...    if len(x) > 6: a.insert(0, x)
>       ... 
>       >>> a
>       ['defenestrate', 'cat', 'window', 'defenestrate']
> 
> Understood, but what if you want to modify each element in a list?
> What's the best way to do this in terms of speed and elegance? I guess
> I just haven't seen a good example of this yet in Python

If I know I'm not going to be altering the length of the list, I
generally do it like this:

for i in range(len(a)):
    if is_cooked(a[i]):
        a[i] = "cooked"

If the list might be changing length, then I generally do

i = 0
while i < len(a):
    ...

and keep track of i by hand.

HTH
Michael

> What I'm unfortunately used to is this, in Perl:
> 
>       @eggs = (1,2,3);
>       foreach $spam (@eggs) {
> 	$spam = 'cooked'; 
>       }
>       print "@eggs";
>       >>> cooked cooked cooked
> 
> Thanks,
> Alex Rice