Skip to content

[3.8] bpo-30826: Improve control flow examples (GH-15407) #15410

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Aug 23, 2019
Merged
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
28 changes: 14 additions & 14 deletions Doc/tutorial/controlflow.rst
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -66,20 +66,20 @@ they appear in the sequence. For example (no pun intended):
window 6
defenestrate 12

If you need to modify the sequence you are iterating over while inside the loop
(for example to duplicate selected items), it is recommended that you first
make a copy. Iterating over a sequence does not implicitly make a copy. The
slice notation makes this especially convenient::

>>> for w in words[:]: # Loop over a slice copy of the entire list.
... if len(w) > 6:
... words.insert(0, w)
...
>>> words
['defenestrate', 'cat', 'window', 'defenestrate']

With ``for w in words:``, the example would attempt to create an infinite list,
inserting ``defenestrate`` over and over again.
Code that modifies a collection while iterating over that same collection can
be tricky to get right. Instead, it is usually more straight-forward to loop
over a copy of the collection or to create a new collection::

# Strategy: Iterate over a copy
for user, status in users.copy().items():
if status == 'inactive':
del users[user]

# Strategy: Create a new collection
active_users = {}
for user, status in users.items():
if status == 'active':
active_users[user] = status


.. _tut-range:
Expand Down