Consuming the iterator is *necessary* to get the last item. There's no way around that.
Obviously, you could itertools.tee() it first if you don't mind the cache space. But there cannot be a generic "jump to the end" of an iterator without being destructive. On Oct 23, 2016 8:43 AM, "Steven D'Aprano" <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 08:37:07AM -0700, David Mertz wrote: > > Of course. But if you want last(), why not just spell the utility > function > > as I did? I.e. as a function: > > > > def last(it): > > for item in it: > > pass > > return item > > > > That works fine for any iteratable (including a list, array, etc), > whether > > or not it's a reduction/accumulation. > > That's no good, because it consumes the iterator. Yes, you get > the last value, but you actually needed to do work on all the > previous values too. > > > -- > Steve > _______________________________________________ > Python-ideas mailing list > Python-ideas@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ >
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