title: how to efficiently exhaust an iterator in a oneliner?
body: <p>If i have an iterator <code>it</code> and want to exhaust it I can write:</p>
  
  <pre><code>for x in it:
      pass
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a builtin or standard library call which allows me to do it in a one-liner?  Of course i could do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>list(it)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which will build a list from the iterator and then discard it.  But i consider that inefficient because of the list-building step.  It's of course trivial to write myself a helper function that does the empty for loop but i am curious if there is something else i am missing. </p>