What is the most “pythonic” way to iterate over a

Question

I have a Python script which takes as input a list of integers, which I need to work with four integers at a time. Unfortunately, I don't have control of the input, or I'd have it passed in as a list of four-element tuples. Currently, I'm iterating over it this way:

for i in xrange(0, len(ints), 4):
    # dummy op for example code
    foo += ints[i] * ints[i + 1] + ints[i + 2] * ints[i + 3]

It looks a lot like "C-think", though, which makes me suspect there's a more pythonic way of dealing with this situation. The list is discarded after iterating, so it needn't be preserved. Perhaps something like this would be better?

while ints:
    foo += ints[0] * ints[1] + ints[2] * ints[3]
    ints[0:4] = []

Still doesn't quite "feel" right, though. :-/

Related question: How do you split a list into evenly sized chunks in Python?

Answer 1

def chunker(seq, size):
    return (seq[pos:pos + size] for pos in range(0, len(seq), size))
# (in python 2 use xrange() instead of range() to avoid allocating a list)

Simple. Easy. Fast. Works with any sequence:

text = "I am a very, very helpful text"

for group in chunker(text, 7):
   print repr(group),
# 'I am a ' 'very, v' 'ery hel' 'pful te' 'xt'

print '|'.join(chunker(text, 10))
# I am a ver|y, very he|lpful text

animals = ['cat', 'dog', 'rabbit', 'duck', 'bird', 'cow', 'gnu', 'fish']

for group in chunker(animals, 3):
    print group
# ['cat', 'dog', 'rabbit']
# ['duck', 'bird', 'cow']
# ['gnu', 'fish']

Answer 2

Similar to other proposals, but not exactly identical, I like doing it this way, because it's simple and easy to read:

it = iter([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9])
for chunk in zip(it, it, it, it):
    print chunk

>>> (1, 2, 3, 4)
>>> (5, 6, 7, 8)

This way you won't get the last partial chunk. If you want to get (9, None, None, None) as last chunk, just use izip_longest from itertools.

Answer 3

I like this approach. It feels simple and not magical and supports all iterable types and doesn't require imports.

def chunk_iter(iterable, chunk_size):
it = iter(iterable)
while True:
    chunk = tuple(next(it) for _ in range(chunk_size))
    if not chunk:
        break
    yield chunk

Answer 4

import itertools
def chunks(iterable,size):
    it = iter(iterable)
    chunk = tuple(itertools.islice(it,size))
    while chunk:
        yield chunk
        chunk = tuple(itertools.islice(it,size))

# though this will throw ValueError if the length of ints
# isn't a multiple of four:
for x1,x2,x3,x4 in chunks(ints,4):
    foo += x1 + x2 + x3 + x4

for chunk in chunks(ints,4):
    foo += sum(chunk)

Another way:

import itertools
def chunks2(iterable,size,filler=None):
    it = itertools.chain(iterable,itertools.repeat(filler,size-1))
    chunk = tuple(itertools.islice(it,size))
    while len(chunk) == size:
        yield chunk
        chunk = tuple(itertools.islice(it,size))

# x2, x3 and x4 could get the value 0 if the length is not
# a multiple of 4.
for x1,x2,x3,x4 in chunks2(ints,4,0):
    foo += x1 + x2 + x3 + x4

Answer 5

Modified from the recipes section of Python's itertools docs:

from itertools import izip_longest

def grouper(iterable, n, fillvalue=None):
    args = [iter(iterable)] * n
    return izip_longest(*args, fillvalue=fillvalue)

Example
In pseudocode to keep the example terse.

grouper('ABCDEFG', 3, 'x') --> 'ABC' 'DEF' 'Gxx'

Note: izip_longest is new to Python 2.6. In Python 3 use zip_longest.

Answer 6

Since nobody's mentioned it yet here's a zip() solution:

>>> def chunker(iterable, chunksize):
...     return zip(*[iter(iterable)]*chunksize)

It works only if your sequence's length is always divisible by the chunk size or you don't care about a trailing chunk if it isn't.

Example:

>>> s = '1234567890'
>>> chunker(s, 3)
[('1', '2', '3'), ('4', '5', '6'), ('7', '8', '9')]
>>> chunker(s, 4)
[('1', '2', '3', '4'), ('5', '6', '7', '8')]
>>> chunker(s, 5)
[('1', '2', '3', '4', '5'), ('6', '7', '8', '9', '0')]

Or using itertools.izip to return an iterator instead of a list:

>>> from itertools import izip
>>> def chunker(iterable, chunksize):
...     return izip(*[iter(iterable)]*chunksize)

Padding can be fixed using @ΤΖΩΤΖΙΟΥ's answer:

>>> from itertools import chain, izip, repeat
>>> def chunker(iterable, chunksize, fillvalue=None):
...     it   = chain(iterable, repeat(fillvalue, chunksize-1))
...     args = [it] * chunksize
...     return izip(*args)