List Comprehensions and Generator Expressions

In functional programming two basic but heavily used operations on iterators are "List Comprehensions" and "Generator Expressions". Let's take a look at what now exactly the difference is.

sentence= "What is the difference between list comprehensions and generator expressions"

word_listcomprehension = [word for word in sentence.split() if len(word) > 3]
print word_listcomprehension

word_generatorexpr = (word for word in sentence.split() if len(word) > 3)
print word_generatorexpr
print next(word_generatorexpr) #print first element
print next(word_generatorexpr) #print second element
print next(word_generatorexpr) #print third element

As you can see a listcomprehension typically returns a list while a generator expression returns a generator. This means that a generator computes values lazily only when they are requested. For very big or infinite iterators listcomprehensions are not useful and generators are the only way to handle this.

['What', 'difference', 'between', 'list', 'comprehensions', 'generator', 'expressions']
<generator object <genexpr> at 0xb754e1e4>
What
difference
between
]]>

It is even possible to write a generator function using the yield keyword.

def alphabet():
   "Return letters of alphabet"
   letters = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
   for letter in letters:
       yield letter  

letters_of_alphabet = alphabet()
print next(letters_of_alphabet)
print next(letters_of_alphabet)  

a
b