Pythonic way to determine whether not null list entries are 'continuous'

Question

I\'m looking for a way to easily determine if all not None items in a list occur in a single continuous slice. I\'ll use integers as examples of not None items

Answer 1

def contiguous(seq):
    seq = iter(seq)
    all(x is None for x in seq)        # Burn through any Nones at the beginning
    any(x is None for x in seq)        # and the first group
    return all(x is None for x in seq) # everthing else (if any) should be None.

Here are a couple of examples. You can use next(seq) to get the next item from an iterator. I'll put a mark pointing to the next item after each

example1:

seq = iter([None, 1, 2, 3, None])        #  [None, 1, 2, 3, None]
                                         # next^
all(x is None for x in seq)            
                                         #        next^
any(x is None for x in seq)            
                                         #                    next^ (off the end)
return all(x is None for x in seq)       # all returns True for the empty sequence

example2:

seq = iter([1, 2, None, 3, None, None])  #    [1, 2, None, 3, None, None]
                                         # next^
all(x is None for x in seq)            
                                         #    next^
any(x is None for x in seq)            
                                         #             next^  
return all(x is None for x in seq)       # all returns False when 3 is encountered