第320页 | Learning Python | 阅读 ‧ 电子书库

Nonexhaustive Traversals: range and Slices

The last example in the prior section works, but it’s not the fastest option. It’s also more work than we need to do. Unless you have a special indexing requirement, you’re always better off using the simple for loop form in Python—as a general rule, use for instead of while whenever possible, and don’t use range calls in for loops except as a last resort. This simpler solution is better:

>>> for item in X: print(item)                    # Simple iteration
...

However, the coding pattern used in the prior example does allow us to do more specialized sorts of traversals. For instance, we can skip items as we go:

>>> S = 'abcdefghijk'
>>> list(range(0, len(S), 2))
[0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10]

>>> for i in range(0, len(S), 2): print(S[i], end=' ')
...
a c e g i k

Here, we visit every second item in the string S by stepping over the generated range list. To visit every third item, change the third range argument to be 3, and so on. In effect, using range this way lets you skip items in loops while still retaining the simplicity of the for loop construct.

Still, this is probably not the ideal best-practice technique in Python today. If you really want to skip items in a sequence, the extended three-limit form of the slice expression, presented in Chapter 7, provides a simpler route to the same goal. To visit every second character in S, for example, slice with a stride of 2:

>>> S = 'abcdefghijk'
>>> for c in S[::2]: print(c, end=' ')
...
a c e g i k

The result is the same, but substantially easier for you to write and for others to read. The only real advantage to using range here instead is that it does not copy the string and does not create a list in 3.0; for very large strings, it may save memory.