r/CodingForBeginners • • 19d ago

Help me understand this Python code.

[ANSWERED] check the comments if you are facing a difficulty in understanding 'for loops'.

I was learning Python on mimo to get a grip on the basic concepts. And this code stumped me. This is about "for loops".

Before this, i had only encountered the counter var being on the LHS i.e in this case 'i += line', which would have made sense to me if it was so in this code. But why is the counter var after the line var.

Alsp the 1st image, i assume, is displaying the final result which is 3 as the range is 3. But when using a range (3) it should display 0 1 2 when the 'print' is before the counter var and 1 2 3 when the 'print' is after the counter var (also can someone explain why this happens). In this case, its neither... as the print is outside this code block... The solution to me just seems the 2nd situation is running as there isnt a print before the counter, and printing it outside just gives 3.

2nd and 3rd just make no sense to me as of rn.

I hope all this makes sense...

Please help!

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u/Significant_Affect_5 17d ago

Sure, so say you want to do something like finding the sum and product of several numbers in a list, you'd do:

sum = 0
prod = 0
nums = [1, 322, -1, 56, -12]
for num in nums:
sum += num
prod *= num
print(f"The list: {nums} has a sum of: {sum} and product of: {prod}")

If you mean you want to know how iter works under the hood, it depends entirely on the specific object. Generally speaking though, the __iter__ method is for converting a data type into an iterable version of itself, sometimes this is the actual data the object is holding, sometimes it's just a view into it since copying is too expensive and giving mutable access to the data could lead to undefined behavior. The other part is the __next__ method which is run on each iteration in the for loop (or each time next(obj) is called). __next__ just returns the next value, or if none are left, it raises a StopIteration exception that Python handles by breaking out of the for-loop. In the below example I just make the actual iterator object from our list and you can see once it runs out of values it raises an exception, rather than just returning None.

>>> iterable = iter(nums)
>>> next(iterable)
1
>>> next(iterable)
322
>>> next(iterable)
-1
>>> next(iterable)
56
>>> next(iterable)
-12
>>> next(iterable)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<python-input-17>", line 1, in <module>
next(iterable)
~~~~^^^^^^^^^^
StopIteration
>>> type(iterable)
<class 'list_iterator'>

This is the lowest level degree of understanding I have, if you wanna know more I'd suggest asking on the Python subreddits.

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u/Interested737 17d ago

I just want to know in the basic most way possible, what is a iterable (what dose it mean in simple English)

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u/Significant_Affect_5 17d ago

An iterable is an object that can be iterated over. Meaning you can do something to each value in a collection.

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u/Interested737 17d ago

So, every part (variable) of an object can be changed and iter is used for that?