Why Is This Listiterator Stuck?

I'm thoroughly puzzled. I have a block of HTML that I scraped out of a larger table. It looks about like this: Number:\xc2\xa0childGenerator() method returns an iterator object via python's built in iter() function. An iterator has a .next() method which returns the next item or raises StopIteration when it runs out of elements.

An enumerator is a special kind of iterator. It also has a .next() method, but instead of returning just the next value, it returns a tuple containing a count and the next value.

Your for loop takes two arguments (i and each) and so the python interpreter expects the iterator to supply a two-element tuple. If you only pass in the iterator supplied by childGenerator(), python only has one element available instead of the two that it needs and chokes. However, if you create an enumerator from the iterator via enumerate(), then the interpreter gets the two-element tuple it requires.

Solution 2:

gnibbler is correct in explaining that you could only consume generators once. Just to expound further:

According to the docs an iterator is an object representing a stream of data. Since you already consumed the stream (i.e you reach the end of the stream), reiterating over it will not yield any data. I had the same problem before but Karl Knechtel's comment cleared things up for me. Hope my explanation is clear.