How do I use itertools.groupby()?

Question

I haven\'t been able to find an understandable explanation of how to actually use Python\'s itertools.groupby() function. What I\'m trying to do is this:

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Answer 1

How do I use Python's itertools.groupby()?

You can use groupby to group things to iterate over. You give groupby an iterable, and a optional key function/callable by which to check the items as they come out of the iterable, and it returns an iterator that gives a two-tuple of the result of the key callable and the actual items in another iterable. From the help:

groupby(iterable[, keyfunc]) -> create an iterator which returns
(key, sub-iterator) grouped by each value of key(value).

Here's an example of groupby using a coroutine to group by a count, it uses a key callable (in this case, coroutine.send) to just spit out the count for however many iterations and a grouped sub-iterator of elements:

import itertools


def grouper(iterable, n):
    def coroutine(n):
        yield # queue up coroutine
        for i in itertools.count():
            for j in range(n):
                yield i
    groups = coroutine(n)
    next(groups) # queue up coroutine

    for c, objs in itertools.groupby(iterable, groups.send):
        yield c, list(objs)
    # or instead of materializing a list of objs, just:
    # return itertools.groupby(iterable, groups.send)

list(grouper(range(10), 3))

prints

[(0, [0, 1, 2]), (1, [3, 4, 5]), (2, [6, 7, 8]), (3, [9])]