Learning advanced tricks for using functions

The use of functions in Python and other programming languages is key for reusability and modularization. However, with new advances to modern programming languages, the role of functions has been extended beyond reusability, which includes writing simple, short, and concise code without using complex loops and conditional statements.

We will start with the use of the counter, zip, and itertools functions, which we will discuss next.

Introducing the counter, itertools, and zip functions for iterative tasks

For any data processing tasks, developers extensively use iterators. We have covered iterators, in detail, in Chapter 4, Python Libraries for Advanced Programming. In this section, we will learn about the next level of utility functions to help you conveniently work with iterators and iterables. These include the counter module, the zip function, and the itertools module. We will discuss each of these in the following subsections...