Book Image

Python Essentials

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Python Essentials

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Python Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 8. More Advanced Functions

In Chapter 7, Basic Function Definitions, we looked at the core features of defining a function which returns a single result. Even functions with an implicit return statement at the end of the suite of statements, or a function with a return statement that has no expression, return a result: the None object is the default return value. In this chapter, we'll look at functions which generate multiple results. A generator function defines an iterable: it can be used with a for statement. This means that the generator doesn't produce a single object with all of the items in the result; instead it produces each item of the result separately.

Python offers generator expressions and comprehensions which complement the idea of generator functions. We can write simple expressions that represent a sequence of values which is generated one item at a time. We can use generator expressions to create list, set, or dict objects via a comprehension.

We'll review the for...