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

Using groupby and count from itertools gives us a short solution. The idea is that, in an increasing sequence, the difference between the index and the value will remain the same.

In order to keep track of the index, we can use an itertools.count, which makes the code cleaner as using enumerate:

from itertools import groupby, count

def intervals(data):
    out = []
    counter = count()

    for key, group in groupby(data, key = lambda x: x-next(counter)):
        block = list(group)
        out.append([block[0], block[-1]])
    return out

Some sample output:

print(intervals([0, 1, 3, 4, 6]))
# [[0, 1], [3, 4], [6, 6]]

print(intervals([2, 3, 4, 5]))
# [[2, 5]]