Splitting a list into N parts of approximately equal length

Question

What is the best way to divide a list into roughly equal parts? For example, if the list has 7 elements and is split it into 2 parts, we want to get 3 elements in o

Answer 1

Here's another variant that spreads the "remaining" elements evenly among all the chunks, one at a time until there are none left. In this implementation, the larger chunks occur at the beginning the process.

def chunks(l, k):
  """ Yield k successive chunks from l."""
  if k < 1:
    yield []
    raise StopIteration
  n = len(l)
  avg = n/k
  remainders = n % k
  start, end = 0, avg
  while start < n:
    if remainders > 0:
      end = end + 1
      remainders = remainders - 1
    yield l[start:end]
    start, end = end, end+avg

For example, generate 4 chunks from a list of 14 elements:

>>> list(chunks(range(14), 4))
[[0, 1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6, 7], [8, 9, 10], [11, 12, 13]]
>>> map(len, list(chunks(range(14), 4)))
[4, 4, 3, 3]