3.7 Applying generators to built-in collections

We’ll now look at ways to apply generator expressions to a number of Python’s built-in collections. This section will cover the following topics:

• Generators for lists, dicts, and sets

• Working with stateful collections

• Using the bisect module to create a mapping

• Using stateful sets

Each of these looks at some specialized cases of Python collections and generator functions. In particular, we’ll look at ways to produce a collection, and consume the collection in later processing.

This is a lead-in to the next chapter, Chapter 4, Working with Collections, which covers the Python collections in considerably more detail.

3.7.1 Generators for lists, dicts, and sets

A Python sequence object, such as a list, is iterable. However, it has some additional features. We can think of a list as a materialized iterable. We’ve used the tuple() function in several examples to collect the output of a generator expression...