Hello community members! Abaqus provides a comprehensive python scripting interface that can help users to automate the pre and  post processing workflows. The scripting interface users must be familiar with the built-in range function that creates a list of arithmetic progressions. As shown in the below example the function is commonly used in for loop.

>>> for i in range(5):

...     print i

...

0

1

2

3

                                                                       4

For large size ODBs you may have experienced that looping through significantly large number of field output values  using the range function can be very time consuming. To alleviate this performance bottleneck you may use the built-in xrange function instead of range that is available in Python 2.x .

xrange was added because range returns a list, and xrange returns an iterator, which avoids the overhead of creating a huge list.

If you prefer you can always use xrange (and not use range) and there is no associated downside. Please note that the xrange function is deprecated in Python-3.x and the range  function itself will give you the nice iterator behavior!

For more details on the built-in functions please refer to the official python website.

I hope the above helps. Should you have any questions please add a comment!

Regards,

Samarth Shah