Since I’m a data scientist and all, my datasets can be too big to deal with when I’m initially testing an idea. So to test a for loop in Python with just a few examples, I used to do this kind of stuff:

n = 0
for thing in things:
    print thing
    n += 1
    if n > 10:
        break

But python’s zip is smart in that it stops when the shortest item in the zip stops!

So you can do:

for i, thing in zip(range(5), things):
    print thing

And it will only show you the first 5 things! And it’s so succinct! This is especially pertinent when your things is a generator and you can’t necessarily get the len of it.

Hope that helps you out! It saves me some headache, KeyboardInterrupts, and keystrokes.