A quirk/gotcha of for i, x in enumerate(seq) when seq is empty

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:30:09 -0800, Alex Willmer wrote:

> This week I was slightly surprised by a behaviour that I've not
> considered before. I've long used
> 
> for i, x in enumerate(seq):
>    # do stuff
> 
> as a standard looping-with-index construct. In Python for loops don't
> create a scope, so the loop variables are available afterward. I've
> sometimes used this to print or return a record count e.g.
> 
> for i, x in enumerate(seq):
>    # do stuff
> print 'Processed %i records' % i+1
> 
> However as I found out, if seq is empty then i and x are never created.

This has nothing to do with enumerate. It applies to for loops in 
general: the loop variable is not initialised if the loop never runs. 
What value should it take? Zero? Minus one? The empty string? None? 
Whatever answer Python choose would be almost always wrong, so it refuses 
to guess.


> The above code will raise NameError. So if a record count is needed, and
> the loop is not guaranteed to execute the following seems more correct:
> 
> i = 0
> for x in seq:
>     # do stuff
>     i += 1
> print 'Processed %i records' % i

What fixes the problem is not avoiding enumerate, or performing the 
increments in slow Python instead of fast C, but that you initialise the 
loop variable you care about before the loop in case it doesn't run.

i = 0
for i,x in enumerate(seq):
    # do stuff

is all you need: the addition of one extra line, to initialise the loop 
variable i (and, if you need it, x) before hand.
 



-- 
Steven