>> I could do nested for ... in loops, but was looking for a Pythonic way
>> to do this. Ideas?
>
> What makes you think nested loops aren't Pythonic?
On their own, nested loops aren't a bad thing. I suspect they
become un-Pythonic when they make code look ugly and show a
broken model of the problem. There's a big diffence between:
# iterate over a 10x10 grid
for i in xrange(10):
for j in xrange(10):
print i,j
which is pretty manageable, but quickly becomes very unpythonic
if the problem is poorly defined:
for a in range(5):
for b in range(5):
for c in range(5):
for d in range(5):
for e in range(5):
for f in range(5):
for g in range(5):
for h in range(5):
for i in range(5):
for j in range(5):
for k in range(5):
for l in range(5):
for m in range(5):
for n in range(5):
for o in range(5):
for p in range(5):
for q in range(5):
for r in range(5):
for s in range(5):
for t in range(5):
for u in range(5):
for v in range(5):
for w in range(5):
for x in range(5):
for y in range(5):
for z in range(5):
print a,b,c,d,e,f,g,
print h,i,j,k,l,m,n,
print o,p,q,r,s,t,u,
print v,w,x,y,z
It gets even worse if your loop nesting is based on something
external. You wouldn't want code that looks like
if len(input) == 2:
for a in range(5):
for b in range(5):
whatever(a,b)
elif len(input) == 3:
for a in range(5):
for b in range(5):
for c in range(5):
whatever(a,b,c)
elif len(input) == 4:
...
Contributing to the unpythonic'ness (unpythonicity?) of it is
that something is clearly happening at a higher level than just
for-loops so other Python constructs should be used to express
them instead of abusing your code to do your dirty work.
-tkc
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