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content/blog/pyleniterables.md

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+---
+title: "Quick Python: Length of Iterables"
+date: 2020-03-25T18:28:09-04:00
+draft: false
+tags: ["python"]
+---
+
+I wanted to find the length of what I know is a finite iterable. Normally you would think of using the `len` function but it does not work in this case. [Al Hoo](https://stackoverflow.com/a/44351664) on StackOverflow shared a quick snippet to calculate this.
+
+```python
+from functools import reduce
+
+def ilen(iterable):
+    return reduce(lambda sum, element: sum + 1, iterable, 0)
+```
+
+This also turns out to be memory efficient since we are only loading in one object into memory from the iterable at a time.