recognizing empty iterators

[Michele Simionato]

After a recent thread on .endswith, I have been thinking about iterators.
I realized that I don't know a satisfactory way to check if an
iterator is empty. In other words I am looking for an
"isempty" function to use in "if" statements such as

if isempty(iterator):
   do_something()

without side effects. Here are some unsatisfactory ways of implementing
"isempty":

#1: converting to a list or tuple
def isempty(iterator):
    return not list(iterator)

Easy, but one has to create the entire list, thus defecting the basic
purpose of the iterator, i.e. lazy evaluation.

#2: checking for StopIteration
def isempty(iterator):
    try:
        iterator.next()
    except StopIteration:
        return True
    else:
        return False

This works, for instance

print isempty(iter([]))

gives True and 

it=iter([1,2,3])
print isempty(it)

gives False. However, there is a side effect: after the check, the
iterator has advanced of one step and now "it.next()" gives 2, not 1. 
In order this to work without side effects, I should be able to restart 
the iterator from the beginning, but I don't know how to do that.
Is it possible?

#3: comparing with the empty iterator

emptyiterator=iter([])

it=iter([])

if it == emptyiterator: print 'Ok!'

This simply doesn't work.

I wonder if the itertools module should contain a function to check for
empty iterators, thus simplifying my life ;) Of course, I may well be
missing something obvious, if so, please enlighten me.


                Michele