An elegant and fast way to consecutively iterate over two or more containers in Python?

Depending on what order you want to process the items:

import itertools

for items in itertools.izip(deque1, deque2, deque3):
    for item in items:
        some_action(item)

for item in itertools.chain(deque1, deque2, deque3):
    some_action(item)

I'd recommend doing this to avoid hard-coding the actual deques or number of deques:

deques = [deque1, deque2, deque3]
for item in itertools.chain(*deques):
    some_action(item)

To demonstrate the difference in order of the above methods:

>>> a = range(5)
>>> b = range(5)
>>> c = range(5)
>>> d = [a, b, c]
>>>
>>> for items in itertools.izip(*d):
...     for item in items:
...         print item,
...
0 0 0 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4
>>>
>>> for item in itertools.chain(*d):
...     print item,
...
0 1 2 3 4 0 1 2 3 4 0 1 2 3 4
>>>

The answer is in itertools

itertools.chain(*iterables)

Make an iterator that returns elements from the first iterable until it is exhausted, then proceeds to the next iterable, until all of the iterables are exhausted. Used for treating consecutive sequences as a single sequence. Equivalent to:

def chain(*iterables):
    # chain('ABC', 'DEF') --> A B C D E F
    for it in iterables:
        for element in it:
            yield element

Call me crazy, but why is using itertools thought to be necessary? What's wrong with:

def perform_func_on_each_object_in_each_of_multiple_containers(func, containers):
    for container in containers:
        for obj in container:
            func(obj)

perform_func_on_each_object_in_each_of_multiple_containers(some_action, (deque1, deque2, deque3)

Even crazier: you probably are going to use this once. Why not just do:

for d in (deque1, deque2, deque3):
    for obj in d:
        some_action(obj)

What's going on there is immediately obvious without having to look at the code/docs for the long-name function or having to look up the docs for itertools.something()