How to find the length of a "filter" object in python

>>> n = [1,2,3,4]

>>> filter(lambda x:x>3,n)
<filter object at 0x0000000002FDBBA8>

>>> len(filter(lambda x:x>3,n))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#3>", line 1, in <module>
    len(filter(lambda x:x>3,n))
TypeError: object of type 'filter' has no len()

I could not get the length of the list I got. So I tried saving it to a variable, like this...

>>> l = filter(lambda x:x>3,n)
>>> len(l)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#5>", line 1, in <module>
    len(l)
TypeError: object of type 'filter' has no len()

Instead of using a loop, is there any way to get the length of this?

Solution 1:

You have to iterate through the filter object somehow. One way is to convert it to a list:

l = list(filter(lambda x: x > 3, n))

len(l)  # <--

But that might defeat the point of using filter() in the first place, since you could do this more easily with a list comprehension:

l = [x for x in n if x > 3]

Again, len(l) will return the length.

Solution 2:

This is an old question, but I think this question needs an answer using the map-reduce ideology. So here:

from functools import reduce

def ilen(iterable):
    return reduce(lambda sum, element: sum + 1, iterable, 0)

ilen(filter(lambda x: x > 3, n))

This is especially good if n doesn't fit in the computer memory.