Identify groups of continuous numbers in a list

Question

I\'d like to identify groups of continuous numbers in a list, so that:

myfunc([2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20])

Returns:

Answer 1

This doesn't use a standard function - it just iiterates over the input, but it should work:

def myfunc(l):
    r = []
    p = q = None
    for x in l + [-1]:
        if x - 1 == q:
            q += 1
        else:
            if p:
               if q > p:
                   r.append('%s-%s' % (p, q))
               else:
                   r.append(str(p))
            p = q = x
    return '(%s)' % ', '.join(r)

Note that it requires that the input contains only positive numbers in ascending order. You should validate the input, but this code is omitted for clarity.