Vfrdtyky

What's a good way to keep counting up infinitely? I'm trying to write a condition that will keep going until there's no value in a database, so it's going to iterate from 0, up to theoretically infinity (inside a try block, of course).

How would I count upwards infinitely? Or should I use something else?

I am looking for something similar to i++ in other languages, where it keeps iterating until failure.

Take a look at itertools.count().

From the docs:

count(start=0, step=1) --> count object

Make an iterator that returns evenly spaced values starting with n.
Equivalent to:

def count(start=0, step=1):

    # count(10) --> 10 11 12 13 14 ...

    # count(2.5, 0.5) -> 2.5 3.0 3.5 ...

    n = start

    while True:

        yield n

        n += step

So for example:

import itertools



for i in itertools.count(13):

   print(i)

would generate an infinite sequence starting with 13, in steps of +1. And, I hadn't tried this before, but you can count down too of course:

for i in itertools.count(100, -5):

    print(i)

starts at 100, and keeps subtracting 5 for each new value ....

This is a bit smaller code than what the other user provided!

x = 1

while True:

    x = x+1

    print x

A little shorter, using an iterator and no library:

x = 0

for x in iter(lambda: x+1, -1):

    print(x)

But it requires a variable in the current scope.

xrange will give you an iterable object that won't use memory as you iterate, a for loop is cleaner than a while loop + counter if you ask me.

import sys

for i in xrange(0,sys.maxint):

   print i