Another itertool function?

[Raymond Hettinger]

[Magnus Lie Hetland]
> The need for the following function just cropped up in a parser I'm
> writing; it seems sufficiently general to perhaps be a candidate for
> itertools -- and I can't see any way of implementing it with the
> current itertools functions:

Okay, I tried it and the result was horrible:

def weave(*iterables):
    "Works perfectly except fails to terminate"
    return ifilter(None, imap(type(chain([])).next,
                cycle(imap(chain, iterables, repeat(repeat(None))))))
>
> def weave(*iterables):
>     iterables = map(iter, iterables)
>     while iterables:
>         for it in iterables[:]:
>             try:
>                 yield it.next()
>             except StopIteration:
>                 iterables.remove(it)
>
> Another possible name (which is a bit more unwieldy) would be
> 'roundrobin'.

I find this name to be the most descriptive.


> I expect there would have to be more use-cases to justify it, but I
> just thought I'd air the idea...

Probably there should be more use cases.
It does seem to be a general purpose tool
for combining iterators.


Here's another idea that was submitted:

def windowed(iterable, group=2):
    "returns (i[0], i[1], ... i[group-1]), (i[1], i[2], ... i[group]), ..."
    it = iter(iterable)
    result = []
    while True:
        result.pop(0)
        result.append(it.next())
        if len(result) == group:
            yield group



Raymond Hettinger