Circular list iterator in Python
I need to iterate over a circular list, possibly many times, each time starting with the last visited item.
The use case is a connection pool. A client asks for connection, an iterator checks if pointed-to connection is available and returns it, otherwise loops until it finds one that is available.
Is there a neat way to do it in Python?
Answer
Use itertools.cycle, that's its exact purpose:
from itertools import cycle
lst = ['a', 'b', 'c']
pool = cycle(lst)
for item in pool:
print item,
Output:
a b c a b c ...
(Loops forever, obviously)
In order to manually advance the iterator and pull values from it one by one, simply call next(pool):
>>> next(pool)
'a'
>>> next(pool)
'b'