Most Pythonic Way to Split an Array by Repeating Elements

Question

I have a list of items that I want to split based on a delimiter. I want all delimiters to be removed and the list to be split when a delimiter occurs twice. F

Answer 1

I don't think there's going to be a nice, elegant solution to this (I'd love to be proven wrong of course) so I would suggest something straightforward:

def nSplit(lst, delim, count=2):
    output = [[]]
    delimCount = 0
    for item in lst:
        if item == delim:
            delimCount += 1
        elif delimCount >= count:
            output.append([item])
            delimCount = 0
        else:
            output[-1].append(item)
            delimCount = 0
    return output

 

>>> nSplit(['a', 'b', 'X', 'X', 'c', 'd', 'X', 'X', 'f', 'X', 'g'], 'X', 2)
[['a', 'b'], ['c', 'd'], ['f', 'g']]