How can I print an array as a string, but have "\n" every X (in my case, 8) indexes? [duplicate]

I have a list of arbitrary length, and I need to split it up into equal size chunks and operate on it. There are some obvious ways to do this, like keeping a counter and two lists, and when the second list fills up, add it to the first list and empty the second list for the next round of data, but this is potentially extremely expensive.

I was wondering if anyone had a good solution to this for lists of any length, e.g. using generators.

I was looking for something useful in itertools but I couldn't find anything obviously useful. Might've missed it, though.

Related question: What is the most “pythonic” way to iterate over a list in chunks?


Here's a generator that yields the chunks you want:

def chunks(lst, n):
    """Yield successive n-sized chunks from lst."""
    for i in range(0, len(lst), n):
        yield lst[i:i + n]

import pprint
pprint.pprint(list(chunks(range(10, 75), 10)))
[[10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19],
 [20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29],
 [30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39],
 [40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49],
 [50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59],
 [60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69],
 [70, 71, 72, 73, 74]]

If you're using Python 2, you should use xrange() instead of range():

def chunks(lst, n):
    """Yield successive n-sized chunks from lst."""
    for i in xrange(0, len(lst), n):
        yield lst[i:i + n]

Also you can simply use list comprehension instead of writing a function, though it's a good idea to encapsulate operations like this in named functions so that your code is easier to understand. Python 3:

[lst[i:i + n] for i in range(0, len(lst), n)]

Python 2 version:

[lst[i:i + n] for i in xrange(0, len(lst), n)]

If you want something super simple:

def chunks(l, n):
    n = max(1, n)
    return (l[i:i+n] for i in range(0, len(l), n))

Use xrange() instead of range() in the case of Python 2.x


I know this is kind of old but nobody yet mentioned numpy.array_split:

import numpy as np

lst = range(50)
np.array_split(lst, 5)
# [array([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]),
#  array([10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19]),
#  array([20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29]),
#  array([30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39]),
#  array([40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49])]