Pythonic way to convert a list of integers into a string of comma-separated ranges

Question

I have a list of integers which I need to parse into a string of ranges.

For example:

 [0, 1, 2, 3] -> \"0-3\"
 [0, 1, 2, 4, 8] -> \"0-2,4,8\"
         


        

Answer 1

This is more verbose, mainly because I have used generic functions that I have and that are minor variations of itertools functions and recipes:

from itertools import tee, izip_longest
def pairwise_longest(iterable):
    "variation of pairwise in http://docs.python.org/library/itertools.html#recipes"
    a, b = tee(iterable)
    next(b, None)
    return izip_longest(a, b)

def takeuntil(predicate, iterable):
    """returns all elements before and including the one for which the predicate is true
    variation of http://docs.python.org/library/itertools.html#itertools.takewhile"""
    for x in iterable:
        yield x
        if predicate(x):
            break

def get_range(it):
    "gets a range from a pairwise iterator"
    rng = list(takeuntil(lambda (a,b): (b is None) or (b-a>1), it))
    if rng:
        b, e = rng[0][0], rng[-1][0]
        return "%d-%d" % (b,e) if b != e else "%d" % b

def create_ranges(zones):
    it = pairwise_longest(zones)
    return ",".join(iter(lambda:get_range(it),None))

k=[0,1,2,4,5,7,9,12,13,14,15]
print create_ranges(k) #0-2,4-5,7,9,12-15