Emulate a do-while loop in Python?

Question

I need to emulate a do-while loop in a Python program. Unfortunately, the following straightforward code does not work:

list_of_ints = [ 1, 2, 3 ]
iterator =         


        

Answer 1

The way I've done this is as follows...

condition = True
while condition:
     do_stuff()
     condition = (<something that evaluates to True or False>)

This seems to me to be the simplistic solution, I'm surprised I haven't seen it here already. This can obviously also be inverted to

while not condition:

etc.

Answer 2

If you're in a scenario where you are looping while a resource is unavaliable or something similar that throws an exception, you could use something like

import time

while True:
    try:
       f = open('some/path', 'r')
    except IOError:
       print('File could not be read. Retrying in 5 seconds')   
       time.sleep(5)
    else:
       break

Answer 3

For me a typical while loop will be something like this:

xBool = True
# A counter to force a condition (eg. yCount = some integer value)

while xBool:
    # set up the condition (eg. if yCount > 0):
        (Do something)
        yCount = yCount - 1
    else:
        # (condition is not met, set xBool False)
        xBool = False

I could include a for..loop within the while loop as well, if situation so warrants, for looping through another set of condition.

Answer 4

I am not sure what you are trying to do. You can implement a do-while loop like this:

while True:
  stuff()
  if fail_condition:
    break

Or:

stuff()
while not fail_condition:
  stuff()

What are you doing trying to use a do while loop to print the stuff in the list? Why not just use:

for i in l:
  print i
print "done"

Update:

So do you have a list of lines? And you want to keep iterating through it? How about:

for s in l: 
  while True: 
    stuff() 
    # use a "break" instead of s = i.next()

Does that seem like something close to what you would want? With your code example, it would be:

for s in some_list:
  while True:
    if state is STATE_CODE:
      if "//" in s:
        tokens.add( TOKEN_COMMENT, s.split( "//" )[1] )
        state = STATE_COMMENT
      else :
        tokens.add( TOKEN_CODE, s )
    if state is STATE_COMMENT:
      if "//" in s:
        tokens.append( TOKEN_COMMENT, s.split( "//" )[1] )
        break # get next s
      else:
        state = STATE_CODE
        # re-evaluate same line
        # continues automatically

Answer 5

do {
  stuff()
} while (condition())

->

while True:
  stuff()
  if not condition():
    break

You can do a function:

def do_while(stuff, condition):
  while condition(stuff()):
    pass

But 1) It's ugly. 2) Condition should be a function with one parameter, supposed to be filled by stuff (it's the only reason not to use the classic while loop.)

Answer 6

Here is a crazier solution of a different pattern -- using coroutines. The code is still very similar, but with one important difference; there are no exit conditions at all! The coroutine (chain of coroutines really) just stops when you stop feeding it with data.

def coroutine(func):
    """Coroutine decorator

    Coroutines must be started, advanced to their first "yield" point,
    and this decorator does this automatically.
    """
    def startcr(*ar, **kw):
        cr = func(*ar, **kw)
        cr.next()
        return cr
    return startcr

@coroutine
def collector(storage):
    """Act as "sink" and collect all sent in @storage"""
    while True:
        storage.append((yield))

@coroutine      
def state_machine(sink):
    """ .send() new parts to be tokenized by the state machine,
    tokens are passed on to @sink
    """ 
    s = ""
    state = STATE_CODE
    while True: 
        if state is STATE_CODE :
            if "//" in s :
                sink.send((TOKEN_COMMENT, s.split( "//" )[1] ))
                state = STATE_COMMENT
            else :
                sink.send(( TOKEN_CODE, s ))
        if state is STATE_COMMENT :
            if "//" in s :
                sink.send(( TOKEN_COMMENT, s.split( "//" )[1] ))
            else
                state = STATE_CODE
                # re-evaluate same line
                continue
        s = (yield)

tokens = []
sm = state_machine(collector(tokens))
for piece in i:
    sm.send(piece)

The code above collects all tokens as tuples in tokens and I assume there is no difference between .append() and .add() in the original code.