Is there a Python equivalent of range(n) for multidimensional ranges?

Question

On Python, range(3) will return [0,1,2]. Is there an equivalent for multidimensional ranges?

range((3,2)) # [(0,0),(0,1),(1,0),(1,1),(2,0),(2,1)]
         


        

Answer 1

You could use itertools.product():

>>> import itertools
>>> for (i,j,k) in itertools.product(xrange(3),xrange(3),xrange(3)):
...     print i,j,k

The multiple repeated xrange() statements could be expressed like so, if you want to scale this up to a ten-dimensional loop or something similarly ridiculous:

>>> for combination in itertools.product( xrange(3), repeat=10 ):
...     print combination

Which loops over ten variables, varying from (0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0) to (2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2).

---

In general itertools is an insanely awesome module. In the same way regexps are vastly more expressive than "plain" string methods, itertools is a very elegant way of expressing complex loops. You owe it to yourself to read the itertools module documentation. It will make your life more fun.