Skip first entry in for loop in python?

Question

In python, How do I do something like:

for car in cars:
   # Skip first and last, do work for rest

Answer 1

Based on @SvenMarnach 's Answer, but bit simpler and without using deque

>>> def skip(iterable, at_start=0, at_end=0):
    it = iter(iterable)
    it = itertools.islice(it, at_start, None)
    it, it1 = itertools.tee(it)
    it1 = itertools.islice(it1, at_end, None)
    return (next(it) for _ in it1)

>>> list(skip(range(10), at_start=2, at_end=2))
[2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
>>> list(skip(range(10), at_start=2, at_end=5))
[2, 3, 4]

Also Note, based on my timeit result, this is marginally faster than the deque solution

>>> iterable=xrange(1000)
>>> stmt1="""
def skip(iterable, at_start=0, at_end=0):
    it = iter(iterable)
    it = itertools.islice(it, at_start, None)
    it, it1 = itertools.tee(it)
    it1 = itertools.islice(it1, at_end, None)
    return (next(it) for _ in it1)
list(skip(iterable,2,2))
    """
>>> stmt2="""
def skip(iterable, at_start=0, at_end=0):
    it = iter(iterable)
    for x in itertools.islice(it, at_start):
        pass
    queue = collections.deque(itertools.islice(it, at_end))
    for x in it:
        queue.append(x)
        yield queue.popleft()
list(skip(iterable,2,2))
        """
>>> timeit.timeit(stmt = stmt1, setup='from __main__ import iterable, skip, itertools', number = 10000)
2.0313770640908047
>>> timeit.timeit(stmt = stmt2, setup='from __main__ import iterable, skip, itertools, collections', number = 10000)
2.9903135454296716