As usual, I am just here to advertise the impressive recipes in the Python itertools documentation.
What you are looking for is the function unique_justseen:
from itertools import imap, groupby
from operator import itemgetter
def unique_justseen(iterable, key=None):
"List unique elements, preserving order. Remember only the element just seen."
# unique_justseen('AAAABBBCCDAABBB') --> A B C D A B
# unique_justseen('ABBCcAD', str.lower) --> A B C A D
return imap(next, imap(itemgetter(1), groupby(iterable, key)))
list(unique_justseen([1,2,2,3])) # [1, 2, 3]
