Now that we understand how iterators work under the hood, we have all the pieces to put the big picture together. Let’s look back at the following dog_foods dictionary and the for loop that performs the iteration:

dog_foods = {
  "Great Dane Foods": 4,
  "Min Pip Pup Foods": 10,
  "Pawsome Pup Foods": 8
}
for food_brand in dog_foods:
  print (food_brand + " has " + str(dog_foods[food_brand]) + " bags")

To summarize, the three main steps are:

1. The for loop will first retrieve an iterator object for the dog_foods dictionary using iter().

2. Then, next() is called on each iteration of the for loop to retrieve the next value. This value is set to the for loop’s variable, food_brand.

3. On each for loop iteration, the print statement is executed, until finally, the for loop executes a call to next() that raises the StopIteration exception. The for loop then exits and is finished iterating.

Let’s review the process in a visual format, before moving on to learn about creating our very own custom iterators!