In ES6, is there any possible to clone an iterator states?
var ma=[1,2,3,4];
var it=ma[Symbol.iterator]();
it.next();
if I want to remember here the it states how should I do in javascritp?
what is remebered in it? since the
JSON.stringify(it) //it would just return {}
It's not possible to clone an iterator. Iterator state is basically completely arbitrary and any given iterator may require or produce side effects (e.g. reading from or writing to a network stream) which are not repeatable on demand.
You can’t clone an arbitrary iterator, but you can create many distinct iterators from one by holding onto some state:
function tee(iterable) {
const source = iterable[Symbol.iterator]();
const buffers = [[], []]; // substitute in queue type for efficiency
const DONE = Object.create(null);
const next = i => {
if (buffers[i].length !== 0) {
return buffers[i].shift();
}
const x = source.next();
if (x.done) {
return DONE;
}
buffers[1 - i].push(x.value);
return x.value;
};
return buffers.map(function* (_, i) {
for (;;) {
const x = next(i);
if (x === DONE) {
break;
}
yield x;
}
});
}
Usage:
const [a, b] = tee(iterator);
assert(a.next().value === b.next().value);
I built a library that allows you to fork an iterator here: https://github.com/tjenkinson/forkable-iterator
Means you can do something like:
import { buildForkableIterator, fork } from 'forkable-iterator';
function* Source() {
yield 1;
yield 2;
return 'return';
}
const forkableIterator = buildForkableIterator(Source());
console.log(forkableIterator.next()); // { value: 1, done: false }
const child1 = fork(forkableIterator);
// { value: 2, done: false }
console.log(child1.next());
// { value: 2, done: false }
console.log(forkableIterator.next());
// { value: 'return', done: true }
console.log(child1.next());
// { value: 'return', done: true }
console.log(forkableIterator.next());
If you no longer need to keep consuming from a fork providing you loose references to it there also shouldn’t be a memory leak.
It's not official yet, but I think there might be a solution in a stage 2 proposal for Iterator Helpers. If these methods don't affect the original iterator, then doing something like iter.take(Infinity) or iter.drop(0) would have the same effect as cloning.
