How to len(generator())

Generators have no length, they aren't collections after all.

Generators are functions with a internal state (and fancy syntax). You can repeatedly call them to get a sequence of values, so you can use them in loop. But they don't contain any elements, so asking for the length of a generator is like asking for the length of a function.

if functions in Python are objects, couldn't I assign the length to a variable of this object that would be accessible to the new generator?

Functions are objects, but you cannot assign new attributes to them. The reason is probably to keep such a basic object as efficient as possible.

You can however simply return (generator, length) pairs from your functions or wrap the generator in a simple object like this:

class GeneratorLen(object):
    def __init__(self, gen, length):
        self.gen = gen
        self.length = length

    def __len__(self): 
        return self.length

    def __iter__(self):
        return self.gen

g = some_generator()
h = GeneratorLen(g, 1)
print len(h), list(h)

Suppose we have a generator:

def gen():
    for i in range(10):
        yield i

We can wrap the generator, along with the known length, in an object:

import itertools
class LenGen(object):
    def __init__(self,gen,length):
        self.gen=gen
        self.length=length
    def __call__(self):
        return itertools.islice(self.gen(),self.length)
    def __len__(self):
        return self.length

lgen=LenGen(gen,10)

Instances of LenGen are generators themselves, since calling them returns an iterator.

Now we can use the lgen generator in place of gen, and access len(lgen) as well:

def new_gen():
    for i in lgen():
        yield float(i)/len(lgen)

for i in new_gen():
    print(i)

You can use len(list(generator_function()). However, this consumes the generator, but that's the only way you can find out how many elements are generated. So you may want to save the list somewhere if you also want to use the items.

a = list(generator_function())
print(len(a))
print(a[0])

You can len(list(generator)) but you could probably make something more efficient if you really intend to discard the results.