Iterating each character in a string using Python

python string iteration
Paradius picture Paradius · Feb 11, 2009 · Viewed 669.1k times · Source

In C++, I can iterate over an std::string like this:

std::string str = "Hello World!";

for (int i = 0; i < str.length(); ++i)
{
    std::cout << str[i] << std::endl;
}

How do I iterate over a string in Python?

Answer

hasen picture hasen · Feb 11, 2009

As Johannes pointed out, 

for c in "string":
    #do something with c

You can iterate pretty much anything in python using the for loop construct,

for example, open("file.txt") returns a file object (and opens the file), iterating over it iterates over lines in that file

with open(filename) as f:
    for line in f:
        # do something with line

If that seems like magic, well it kinda is, but the idea behind it is really simple.

There's a simple iterator protocol that can be applied to any kind of object to make the for loop work on it.

Simply implement an iterator that defines a next() method, and implement an __iter__ method on a class to make it iterable. (the __iter__ of course, should return an iterator object, that is, an object that defines next())

See official documentation

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