Can iterators be reset in Python?

Only if the underlying type provides a mechanism for doing so (e.g. fp.seek(0)).

No. Python's iterator protocol is very simple, and only provides one single method (.next() or __next__()), and no method to reset an iterator in general.

The common pattern is to instead create a new iterator using the same procedure again.

If you want to "save off" an iterator so that you can go back to its beginning, you may also fork the iterator by using itertools.tee

If you have a csv file named 'blah.csv' That looks like

a,b,c,d
1,2,3,4
2,3,4,5
3,4,5,6

you know that you can open the file for reading, and create a DictReader with

blah = open('blah.csv', 'r')
reader= csv.DictReader(blah)

Then, you will be able to get the next line with reader.next(), which should output

{'a':1,'b':2,'c':3,'d':4}

using it again will produce

{'a':2,'b':3,'c':4,'d':5}

However, at this point if you use blah.seek(0), the next time you call reader.next() you will get

{'a':1,'b':2,'c':3,'d':4}

again.

This seems to be the functionality you're looking for. I'm sure there are some tricks associated with this approach that I'm not aware of however. @Brian suggested simply creating another DictReader. This won't work if you're first reader is half way through reading the file, as your new reader will have unexpected keys and values from wherever you are in the file.

While there is no iterator reset, the "itertools" module from python 2.6 (and later) has some utilities that can help there. One of then is the "tee" which can make multiple copies of an iterator, and cache the results of the one running ahead, so that these results are used on the copies. I will seve your purposes:

>>> def printiter(n):
...   for i in xrange(n):
...     print "iterating value %d" % i
...     yield i

>>> from itertools import tee
>>> a, b = tee(printiter(5), 2)
>>> list(a)
iterating value 0
iterating value 1
iterating value 2
iterating value 3
iterating value 4
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> list(b)
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

There's a bug in using .seek(0) as advocated by Alex Martelli and Wilduck above, namely that the next call to .next() will give you a dictionary of your header row in the form of {key1:key1, key2:key2, ...}. The work around is to follow file.seek(0) with a call to reader.next() to get rid of the header row.

So your code would look something like this:

f_in = open('myfile.csv','r')
reader = csv.DictReader(f_in)

for record in reader:
    if some_condition:
        # reset reader to first row of data on 2nd line of file
        f_in.seek(0)
        reader.next()
        continue
    do_something(record)

Yes, if you use numpy.nditer to build your iterator.

>>> lst = [1,2,3,4,5]
>>> itr = numpy.nditer([lst])
>>> itr.next()
1
>>> itr.next()
2
>>> itr.finished
False
>>> itr.reset()
>>> itr.next()
1

For DictReader:

f = open(filename, "rb")
d = csv.DictReader(f, delimiter=",")

f.seek(0)
d.__init__(f, delimiter=",")

For DictWriter:

f = open(filename, "rb+")
d = csv.DictWriter(f, fieldnames=fields, delimiter=",")

f.seek(0)
f.truncate(0)
d.__init__(f, fieldnames=fields, delimiter=",")
d.writeheader()
f.flush()