Question

I’m a somewhat new to python and was looking through the Django source code. I came across utils.py, and was somewhat confused about what this iterator method does:

def __iter__(self):
        return iter(self.file)

What would this be used for?

Answer 1

Iterating through a file yields all its lines, e.g.:

for line in open("foo.txt"):
    print line

Results in:

line1

line2

line3

if foo.txt is:

line1
line2
line3

(extra newlines because line includes the newlines of the file).

So, iterating through an instance of the class whose source you posted a snippet from results in iterating through that instance’s file‘s lines.