erik gartz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The loop performs some actions with web services. The particular > iteration I'm on isn't important to me. It is only important that I > attempt the web services that number of times. If I succeed I > obviously break out of the loop and the containing function (the > function which has the loop in it) returns True. If all attempts > fail the containing loop returns False.
When you have iteration requirements that don't seem to fit the built-in types (lists, dicts, generators etc.), turn to 'itertools' <URL:http://www.python.org/doc/lib/module-itertools> in the standard library. >>> from itertools import repeat >>> def foo(): ... import random ... print "Trying ..." ... success = random.choice([True, False]) ... return success ... >>> max_attempts = 10 >>> for foo_attempt in repeat(foo, max_attempts): ... if foo_attempt(): ... break ... Trying ... Trying ... Trying ... Trying ... Trying ... Trying ... >>> Note that this is possibly more readable than 'for foo_attempt in [foo] * max_attempts", and is more efficient for large values of 'max_attempts' because 'repeat' returns an iterator instead of actually allocating the whole sequence. > I guess based on the replies of everyone my best bet is to leave the > code the way it is and suck up the warning from pylint. I think your intent -- "repeat this operation N times" -- is better expressed by the above code, than by keeping count of something you don't actually care about. > I don't want to turn the warning off because catching unused > variables in the general is useful to me. Agreed. -- \ "Dyslexia means never having to say that you're ysror." | `\ —anonymous | _o__) | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
