I like the cardinality package for this, it is very lightweight and tries to use the fastest possible implementation available depending on the iterable.
Usage:
>>> import cardinality
>>> cardinality.count([1, 2, 3])
3
>>> cardinality.count(i for i in range(500))
500
>>> def gen():
... yield 'hello'
... yield 'world'
>>> cardinality.count(gen())
2
The actual count()
implementation is as follows:
def count(iterable):
if hasattr(iterable, '__len__'):
return len(iterable)
d = collections.deque(enumerate(iterable, 1), maxlen=1)
return d[0][0] if d else 0