How to do an inverse `range`, i.e. create a compact range based on a set of numbers?

Question

Python has a range method, which allows for stuff like:

>>> range(1, 6)
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

What I’m looking for is kind of t

Answer 1

Let's try generators!

# ignore duplicate values
l = sorted( set( [5,7,9,8,6, 21,20, 3,2,1, 22,23, 50] ) )

# get the value differences 
d = (i2-i1 for i1,i2 in zip(l,l[1:]))

# get the gap indices
gaps = (i for i,e in enumerate(d) if e != 1)

# get the range boundaries
def get_ranges(gaps, l):
  last_idx = -1
  for i in gaps:
    yield (last_idx+1, i)
    last_idx = i
  yield (last_idx+1,len(l)-1)

# make a list of strings in the requested format (thanks Frg!)
ranges = [ "%s-%s" % (l[i1],l[i2]) if i1!=i2 else str(l[i1]) \
  for i1,i2 in get_ranges(gaps, l) ]

This has become rather scary, I think :)