yield break in Python

def generate_nothing():
    return
    yield

A good way to handle this is raising StopIteration which is what is raised when your iterator has nothing left to yield and next() is called. This will also gracefully break out of a for loop with nothing inside the loop executed.

For example, given a tuple (0, 1, 2, 3) I want to get overlapping pairs ((0, 1), (1, 2), (2, 3)). I could do it like so:

def pairs(numbers):
    if len(numbers) < 2:
        raise StopIteration

    for i, number in enumerate(numbers[1:]):
        yield numbers[i], number

Now pairs safely handles lists with 1 number or less.

def generate_nothing():
    return iter([])