performance - How can I make a for-loop pyramid more concise in Python?

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Answer 1

Based on what you want to do, you can use the itertools module to minimize the for loops (or zip).In this case itertools.product would create what you have done with the 4 loops:

>>> list(product(range(3),repeat=4))
[(0, 0, 0, 0), (0, 0, 0, 1), (0, 0, 0, 2), (0, 0, 1, 0), (0, 0, 1, 1),
 (0, 0, 1, 2), (0, 0, 2, 0), (0, 0, 2, 1), (0, 0, 2, 2), (0, 1, 0, 0),
 (0, 1, 0, 1), (0, 1, 0, 2), (0, 1, 1, 0), (0, 1, 1, 1), (0, 1, 1, 2),
 (0, 1, 2, 0), (0, 1, 2, 1), (0, 1, 2, 2), (0, 2, 0, 0), (0, 2, 0, 1),
 (0, 2, 0, 2), (0, 2, 1, 0), (0, 2, 1, 1), (0, 2, 1, 2), (0, 2, 2, 0),
 (0, 2, 2, 1), (0, 2, 2, 2), (1, 0, 0, 0), (1, 0, 0, 1), (1, 0, 0, 2),
 (1, 0, 1, 0), (1, 0, 1, 1), (1, 0, 1, 2), (1, 0, 2, 0), (1, 0, 2, 1),
 (1, 0, 2, 2), (1, 1, 0, 0), (1, 1, 0, 1), (1, 1, 0, 2), (1, 1, 1, 0),
 (1, 1, 1, 1), (1, 1, 1, 2), (1, 1, 2, 0), (1, 1, 2, 1), (1, 1, 2, 2),
 (1, 2, 0, 0), (1, 2, 0, 1), (1, 2, 0, 2), (1, 2, 1, 0), (1, 2, 1, 1),
 (1, 2, 1, 2), (1, 2, 2, 0), (1, 2, 2, 1), (1, 2, 2, 2), (2, 0, 0, 0),
 (2, 0, 0, 1), (2, 0, 0, 2), (2, 0, 1, 0), (2, 0, 1, 1), (2, 0, 1, 2),
 (2, 0, 2, 0), (2, 0, 2, 1), (2, 0, 2, 2), (2, 1, 0, 0), (2, 1, 0, 1),
 (2, 1, 0, 2), (2, 1, 1, 0), (2, 1, 1, 1), (2, 1, 1, 2), (2, 1, 2, 0),
 (2, 1, 2, 1), (2, 1, 2, 2), (2, 2, 0, 0), (2, 2, 0, 1), (2, 2, 0, 2),
 (2, 2, 1, 0), (2, 2, 1, 1), (2, 2, 1, 2), (2, 2, 2, 0), (2, 2, 2, 1),
 (2, 2, 2, 2)]

And in your code you can do :

for i,j,k,l in product(range(3),repeat=4):
    #do stuff

This function is equivalent to the following code, except that the actual implementation does not build up intermediate results in memory:

def product(*args, **kwds):
    # product('ABCD', 'xy') --> Ax Ay Bx By Cx Cy Dx Dy
    # product(range(2), repeat=3) --> 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111
    pools = map(tuple, args) * kwds.get('repeat', 1)
    result = [[]]
    for pool in pools:
        result = [x+[y] for x in result for y in pool]
    for prod in result:
        yield tuple(prod)

Edit:As @ PeterE says in comment product() can be used even if the ranges have differing length :

product(range(3),range(4),['a','b','c'] ,some_other_iterable)