What is the most "pythonic" way to iterate over a list in chunks?
I have a Python script which takes as input a list of integers, which I need to work with four integers at a time. Unfortunately, I don't have control of the input, or I'd have it passed in as a list of four-element tuples. Currently, I'm iterating over it this way:
for i in range(0, len(ints), 4):
# dummy op for example code
foo += ints[i] * ints[i + 1] + ints[i + 2] * ints[i + 3]
It looks a lot like "C-think", though, which makes me suspect there's a more pythonic way of dealing with this situation. The list is discarded after iterating, so it needn't be preserved. Perhaps something like this would be better?
while ints:
foo += ints[0] * ints[1] + ints[2] * ints[3]
ints[0:4] = []
Still doesn't quite "feel" right, though. :-/
Related question: How do you split a list into evenly sized chunks in Python?
def chunker(seq, size):
return (seq[pos:pos + size] for pos in range(0, len(seq), size))
# (in python 2 use xrange() instead of range() to avoid allocating a list)
Works with any sequence:
text = "I am a very, very helpful text"
for group in chunker(text, 7):
print(repr(group),)
# 'I am a ' 'very, v' 'ery hel' 'pful te' 'xt'
print '|'.join(chunker(text, 10))
# I am a ver|y, very he|lpful text
animals = ['cat', 'dog', 'rabbit', 'duck', 'bird', 'cow', 'gnu', 'fish']
for group in chunker(animals, 3):
print(group)
# ['cat', 'dog', 'rabbit']
# ['duck', 'bird', 'cow']
# ['gnu', 'fish']
Modified from the Recipes section of Python's itertools
docs:
from itertools import zip_longest
def grouper(iterable, n, fillvalue=None):
args = [iter(iterable)] * n
return zip_longest(*args, fillvalue=fillvalue)
Example
grouper('ABCDEFG', 3, 'x') # --> 'ABC' 'DEF' 'Gxx'
Note: on Python 2 use izip_longest
instead of zip_longest
.
chunk_size = 4
for i in range(0, len(ints), chunk_size):
chunk = ints[i:i+chunk_size]
# process chunk of size <= chunk_size