While writing an article about Generators, I realized that though iteration, iterable and iterator are so commonly used in programming; there is a certain degree of confusion around them. It’s crucial to understand the underlying concept for a better implementation. This is going to be a short and quick article to help us determine what is an iterable and what is an iterator.
Iteration
In layman’s language it is ‘repeating steps’.
Iteration in programming is a repetition of a block of code for a certain number of times.
This can be achieved by using loops.
Iterable
Iterable is an object which can be looped over or iterated over. e.g. List, Tuple, Set, Dictionary, File.
In simpler words, iterable is a container which has data or values and we perform iteration over it to get elements one by one. (Can traverse through these values one by one)
Iterable has an in-built dunder method __iter__. A simpler way to determine whether an object is iterable is to check if it supports __iter__. How? Using dir( ), it returns the list of attributes and methods supported by an object.
