Identify groups of continuous numbers in a list

Question

I\'d like to identify groups of continuous numbers in a list, so that:

myfunc([2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20])

Returns:

Answer 1

Here's the answer I came up with. I'm writing the code for other people to understand, so I'm fairly verbose with variable names and comments.

First a quick helper function:

def getpreviousitem(mylist,myitem):
    '''Given a list and an item, return previous item in list'''
    for position, item in enumerate(mylist):
        if item == myitem:
            # First item has no previous item
            if position == 0:
                return None
            # Return previous item    
            return mylist[position-1] 

And then the actual code:

def getranges(cpulist):
    '''Given a sorted list of numbers, return a list of ranges'''
    rangelist = []
    inrange = False
    for item in cpulist:
        previousitem = getpreviousitem(cpulist,item)
        if previousitem == item - 1:
            # We're in a range
            if inrange == True:
                # It's an existing range - change the end to the current item
                newrange[1] = item
            else:    
                # We've found a new range.
                newrange = [item-1,item]
            # Update to show we are now in a range    
            inrange = True    
        else:   
            # We were in a range but now it just ended
            if inrange == True:
                # Save the old range
                rangelist.append(newrange)
            # Update to show we're no longer in a range    
            inrange = False 
    # Add the final range found to our list
    if inrange == True:
        rangelist.append(newrange)
    return rangelist

Example run:

getranges([2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17])

returns:

[[2, 5], [12, 17]]