Python Pocket Reference, Second Edition

Name

The for Statement

Synopsis

for target in sequence: 
    suite
[else:
    suite]

Sequence iteration. Assigns items in sequence to target and runs first suite for each. Runs else suite if loop exits without hitting a break statement. target may be anything that can appear on the left side of an “=” assignment statement (e.g., for (x, y) in tuplelist:).

In 2.2, works by first trying to obtain an iterator object with iter(sequence) and then calling that object’s next( ) method repeatedly until StopIteration is raised (see The yield Statement). In earlier versions, or if no iterator object can be obtained (e.g., no _ _iter_ _ method is defined), works instead by repeatedly indexing sequence at successively higher offsets until an IndexError is raised.