What does enumerate mean

Question

I am using tkinter in Python and came across the following code:

for row_number, row in enumerate(cursor):
 

I was wondering whether anyone could explain what enumerate means in this context?

Answer 1

The enumerate() function adds a counter to an iterable.

So for each element in the cursor, a tuple is produced with (counter, element); the for loop binds that to row_number and row, respectively.

Demo:

>>> elements = ('foo', 'bar', 'baz')
>>> for elem in elements:
...     print elem
...
foo
bar
baz
>>> for count, elem in enumerate(elements):
...     print count, elem
...
0 foo
1 bar
2 baz