Split a generator into chunks without pre-walking it

(This question is related to this one and this one, but those are pre-walking the generator, which is exactly what I want to avoid)

I would like to split a generator in chunks. The requirements are:

• do not pad the chunks: if the number of remaining elements is less than the chunk size, the last chunk must be smaller.
• do not walk the generator beforehand: computing the elements is expensive, and it must only be done by the consuming function, not by the chunker
• which means, of course: do not accumulate in memory (no lists)

I have tried the following code:

def head(iterable, max=10):
    for cnt, el in enumerate(iterable):
        yield el
        if cnt >= max:
            break

def chunks(iterable, size=10):
    i = iter(iterable)
    while True:
        yield head(i, size)

# Sample generator: the real data is much more complex, and expensive to compute
els = xrange(7)

for n, chunk in enumerate(chunks(els, 3)):
    for el in chunk:
        print 'Chunk %3d, value %d' % (n, el)

And this somehow works:

Chunk   0, value 0
Chunk   0, value 1
Chunk   0, value 2
Chunk   1, value 3
Chunk   1, value 4
Chunk   1, value 5
Chunk   2, value 6
^CTraceback (most recent call last):
  File "xxxx.py", line 15, in <module>
    for el in chunk:
  File "xxxx.py", line 2, in head
    for cnt, el in enumerate(iterable):
KeyboardInterrupt

Buuuut … it never stops (I have to press ^C) because of the while True. I would like to stop that loop whenever the generator has been consumed, but I do not know how to detect that situation. I have tried raising an Exception:

class NoMoreData(Exception):
    pass

def head(iterable, max=10):
    for cnt, el in enumerate(iterable):
        yield el
        if cnt >= max:
            break
    if cnt == 0 : raise NoMoreData()

def chunks(iterable, size=10):
    i = iter(iterable)
    while True:
        try:
            yield head(i, size)
        except NoMoreData:
            break

# Sample generator: the real data is much more complex, and expensive to compute    
els = xrange(7)

for n, chunk in enumerate(chunks(els, 2)):
    for el in chunk:
        print 'Chunk %3d, value %d' % (n, el)

But then the exception is only raised in the context of the consumer, which is not what I want (I want to keep the consumer code clean)

Chunk   0, value 0
Chunk   0, value 1
Chunk   0, value 2
Chunk   1, value 3
Chunk   1, value 4
Chunk   1, value 5
Chunk   2, value 6
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "xxxx.py", line 22, in <module>
    for el in chunk:
  File "xxxx.py", line 9, in head
    if cnt == 0 : raise NoMoreData
__main__.NoMoreData()

How can I detect that the generator is exhausted in the chunks function, without walking it?

Answer

One way would be to peek at the first element, if any, and then create and return the actual generator.

def head(iterable, max=10):
    first = next(iterable)      # raise exception when depleted
    def head_inner():
        yield first             # yield the extracted first element
        for cnt, el in enumerate(iterable):
            yield el
            if cnt + 1 >= max:  # cnt + 1 to include first
                break
    return head_inner()

Just use this in your chunk generator and catch the StopIteration exception like you did with your custom exception.

---

Update: Here’s another version, using itertools.islice to replace most of the head function, and a for loop. This simple for loop in fact does exactly the same thing as that unwieldy while-try-next-except-break construct in the original code, so the result is much more readable.

def chunks(iterable, size=10):
    iterator = iter(iterable)
    for first in iterator:    # stops when iterator is depleted
        def chunk():          # construct generator for next chunk
            yield first       # yield element from for loop
            for more in islice(iterator, size - 1):
                yield more    # yield more elements from the iterator
        yield chunk()         # in outer generator, yield next chunk

And we can get even shorter than that, using itertools.chain to replace the inner generator:

def chunks(iterable, size=10):
    iterator = iter(iterable)
    for first in iterator:
        yield chain([first], islice(iterator, size - 1))