why do python strings not have __iter__ function?

Question

How is it that we can iterate over python strings when strings don\'t have an __iter__ function?

$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 16 2010, 13:         


        

Answer 1

Probably because Python isn't a langage that has a "char" type. The natural thing to return, if string did have __iter__ would be chars, but there are no chars. I can see a case for hooking __iter__ up to string and doing whatever list(someString) does, not really sure why it's not that way.

Answer 2

From your link:

or it must support the sequence protocol (the __getitem__() method with integer arguments starting at 0).

In [1]: 'foo'.__getitem__(0)
Out[1]: 'f'