Iterator

The Iterator Pattern is commonly used in Computer Science as a way to access elements of a collection, regardless of how they were implemented. An iterator may also be called a cursor.

Description

An iterator may be though of as a kind of pointer that has two basic operations, referencing one particular element in a collection, and pointing to the next element in the collection. Depending on the language the iterator is implemented in, other functionality may be added to the iterator object.

The purpose of an iterator is to give a user a way to process each element of a container while separating the user from the internal structure of the container. This allows the container to store elements however it wants to, while allowing the user to use it as if it were just a simple list or sequence. An iterator class is usually designed in coordination with the container class, which usually provides methods or functions for creating iterators.

An easy way to think of iterators, is to also think of, Lists, Linked Lists, Binary Trees, and Hash Tables, because they operate very much in the same way that iterators do.

Implicit Iterators

Some object-oriented languages have iterator support included within the language, without having to implement an explicit iterator object. Some of these language include:

• C#
• Java (After 5.0)
• Python
• PERL

UML

Design class diagram in UML of the Iterator Pattern being used in a system.

Code Samples

The following are samples of code from C#, Java, Python, and PERL, displaying how they use iterators.

C#

// C#, implicit iteration
foreach (Value v in list)
   Console.WriteLine(v);

Java

// Java, J2SE 5.0, implicit iteration
for (Value v : list)
   System.out.print(v);

Python

# Python, implicit iteration
for Value in List:
   print Value

PERL

# Perl, implicit iteration
foreach $val (@list) {
   print "$val\n";

}

Examples

C++

This is a code snippet from a file called transfer.cc, created by the Gnome VFS Development Team. This particular function, transfer_list, transfers a list of URI's from the source list to the target list. The source code repository can be found here.

void transfer_list(const Glib::StringArrayHandle& source_uri_list, const Glib::StringArrayHandle& target_uri_list,
     TransferOptions options,
     ErrorMode error_mode,
     OverwriteMode overwrite_mode,
     const SlotProgress& slot)
{
 typedef std::list< Glib::RefPtr<Uri> > uri_list;
 uri_list sources, targets;

 //Build lists of RefPtr<Uri>s from the strings:
 Glib::StringArrayHandle::const_iterator iter_target = target_uri_list.begin();
 for(Glib::StringArrayHandle::const_iterator iter = source_uri_list.begin(); iter != source_uri_list.end(); ++iter)
 {
   if(iter_target != target_uri_list.end())
   {
     sources.push_back( Uri::create(*iter) );
     targets.push_back( Uri::create(*iter_target) );
     iter_target++;
   }
 }
 transfer_list_uris(sources, targets, options, error_mode, overwrite_mode, slot);
}

References

• Wikipedia entry on Iterator
• Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza