how to split an iterable in constant-size chunks [

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How do you split a list into evenly sized chunks in Python?

I am surprised I could not find a "batch" function that would take as input an iterable and return an iterable of iterables.

For example:

for i in batch(range(0,10), 1): print i
[0]
[1]
...
[9]

or:

for i in batch(range(0,10), 3): print i
[0,1,2]
[3,4,5]
[6,7,8]
[9]

Now, I wrote what I thought was a pretty simple generator:

def batch(iterable, n = 1):
   current_batch = []
   for item in iterable:
       current_batch.append(item)
       if len(current_batch) == n:
           yield current_batch
           current_batch = []
   if current_batch:
       yield current_batch

But the above does not give me what I would have expected:

for x in   batch(range(0,10),3): print x
[0]
[0, 1]
[0, 1, 2]
[3]
[3, 4]
[3, 4, 5]
[6]
[6, 7]
[6, 7, 8]
[9]

So, I have missed something and this probably shows my complete lack of understanding of python generators. Anyone would care to point me in the right direction ?

[Edit: I eventually realized that the above behavior happens only when I run this within ipython rather than python itself]

Answer 1

Weird, seems to work fine for me in Python 2.x

>>> def batch(iterable, n = 1):
...    current_batch = []
...    for item in iterable:
...        current_batch.append(item)
...        if len(current_batch) == n:
...            yield current_batch
...            current_batch = []
...    if current_batch:
...        yield current_batch
...
>>> for x in batch(range(0, 10), 3):
...     print x
...
[0, 1, 2]
[3, 4, 5]
[6, 7, 8]
[9]

Answer 2

This is probably more efficient (faster)

def batch(iterable, n=1):
    l = len(iterable)
    for ndx in range(0, l, n):
        yield iterable[ndx:min(ndx + n, l)]

for x in batch(range(0, 10), 3):
    print x

It avoids building new lists.

Answer 3

As others have noted, the code you have given does exactly what you want. For another approach using itertools.islice you could see an example of following recipe:

from itertools import islice, chain

def batch(iterable, size):
    sourceiter = iter(iterable)
    while True:
        batchiter = islice(sourceiter, size)
        yield chain([batchiter.next()], batchiter)

Answer 4

FWIW, the recipes in the itertools module provides this example:

def grouper(n, iterable, fillvalue=None):
    "grouper(3, 'ABCDEFG', 'x') --> ABC DEF Gxx"
    args = [iter(iterable)] * n
    return izip_longest(fillvalue=fillvalue, *args)

It works like this:

>>> list(grouper(3, range(10)))
[(0, 1, 2), (3, 4, 5), (6, 7, 8), (9, None, None)]