The in keyword of Python explained Saturday, 9 March 2019 6 mins

When learning Python, one of the first things we do with lists, dictionaries and other iterators is something like the following:

(All examples are in Python 3.6.6)

for i in mylist : do_something ( i )

This loops through each element in mylist and calls the do_something function on it. The other use of the in keyword, however, is to check if an element is present in some sort of container (lists, sets, dictionaries, etc).

if 1 in mylist : do_something ()

But what’s going on under the hood?

How does the iterator know which element to assign to i in each iteration of the for loop? How does the container know to check itself for the presence of the given element?

The answer is that the in keyword tells the Python runtime to check for the presence of magic functions implemented by the iterator or container. The way Python does this lookup is usually referred to as duck typing. This concept is also present in other so-called “dynamic” languages (Ruby and Javascript come to mind).

iter(), __iter__() and __next__()

The first two magic functions that all iterators implement are __iter__() and __next__() .

For example:

class MyIterator : def __init__ ( self , mylist ): self . data = mylist self . index = 0 def __iter__ ( self ): return self def __next__ ( self ): if self . index < len ( self . data ): ret = self . data [ self . index ] self . index += 1 return ret else : raise StopIteration for i in MyIterator ([ 1 , 2 , 3 ]): print ( i )

gives

1 2 3

The for keyword calls iter() on MyIterator which invokes the __iter__() method. Afterwards on each successive iteration of the loop, it calls __next__() which I have written to return the next element of the list.

__contains__()

To be able to test membership in your container, the __contains__() method must be implemented.

class MyContainer : def __init__ ( self , mylist ): self . data = mylist def __contains__ ( self , element ): return element in self . data my_container = MyContainer ([ 2 , 42 , 27 , 101 ]) print ( 42 in my_container ) print ( 22 in my_container )

gives

True False

Both at once!

Putting them together:

class MyIterator : def __init__ ( self , mylist ): self . data = mylist self . index = 0 def __iter__ ( self ): return self def __next__ ( self ): if self . index < len ( self . data ): ret = self . data [ self . index ] self . index += 1 return ret else : raise StopIteration def __contains__ ( self , element ): return element in self . data my_iterator = MyIterator ([ 1 , 2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]) for i in my_iterator : print ( i ) for i in my_iterator : print ( i ) print ( 4 in my_iterator )

Output:

$ python3 iterator.py 1 2 4 5 6 7 True

You may notice however, that self.index never gets reset to 0 within the next() method, so the second for loop over my_iterator doesn’t get executed.

Also, the __iter__() method should reset self.index every time it is called because if the for loop gets interrupted, the next for loop to iterate over MyIterator starts from where the last loop stopped. However, you may desire this behaviour if you wish the iterator to pick up from where it left off. (Perhaps in an implementation of a message queue where you want consumers to continue even if one or more fail, but that’s out of the scope of this article.)

Here we end up with the complete implementation.

class MyIterator : def __init__ ( self , mylist ): self . data = mylist self . index = 0 def __iter__ ( self ): self . index = 0 return self def __next__ ( self ): if self . index < len ( self . data ): ret = self . data [ self . index ] self . index += 1 return ret else : self . index = 0 raise StopIteration def __contains__ ( self , element ): return element in self . data my_iterator = MyIterator ([ 1 , 2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]) try : for i in my_iterator : if i > 2 : raise Error print ( i ) except : print ( "Early termination" ) for i in my_iterator : print ( i ) print ( 4 in my_iterator )

And this gives the expected output:

$ python3 iterator.py 1 2 Early termination 1 2 4 5 6 7 True

Edit: Fixed list naming in example to avoid using the list keyword as a variable name

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