Need to get the rest of an iterator in python

Question

Say I have an iterator.
After iterating over a few items of the iterator, I will have to get rid of these first few items and return an iterator(preferably the same) with the rest of the items. How do I go about? Also, Do iterators support remove or pop operations (like lists)?

Answer 1

Yes, just use iter.next()

Example

iter = xrange(3).__iter__()

iter.next() # this pops 0

for i in iter:
  print i

1
2

You can pop off the front of an iterator with .next(). You cannot do any other fancy operations.

Answer 2

The itertools.dropwhile() function might be helpful, too:

dropwhile(lambda x: x<5, xrange(10))