In this new post to his blog Stanislav Malyshev looks at creating some Ruby-like iterators as close as they can get in PHP.

I've started playing with Ruby recently, and one of the things that got my attention in Ruby were iterators. They are different inside from regular loops but work in a similar way, and looks like people (at least ones that write tutorials and code examples) like to use them.

He saw how one of the iterators worked - iterating over a Ruby hash - and wondered how difficult it'd be to write up something comparable in PHP. He creates a simple iterator, an array class to lay on top of it and an example of it in use. The use isn't as clean as the Ruby iterator, but it works similarly. He also includes a modification that lets you use ranges for what to return.