Splitting a list into N parts of approximately equal length

Question

What is the best way to divide a list into roughly equal parts? For example, if the list has 7 elements and is split it into 2 parts, we want to get 3 elements in o

Answer 1

Changing the code to yield n chunks rather than chunks of n:

def chunks(l, n):
    """ Yield n successive chunks from l.
    """
    newn = int(len(l) / n)
    for i in xrange(0, n-1):
        yield l[i*newn:i*newn+newn]
    yield l[n*newn-newn:]

l = range(56)
three_chunks = chunks (l, 3)
print three_chunks.next()
print three_chunks.next()
print three_chunks.next()

which gives:

[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17]
[18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35]
[36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55]

This will assign the extra elements to the final group which is not perfect but well within your specification of "roughly N equal parts" :-) By that, I mean 56 elements would be better as (19,19,18) whereas this gives (18,18,20).

You can get the more balanced output with the following code:

#!/usr/bin/python
def chunks(l, n):
    """ Yield n successive chunks from l.
    """
    newn = int(1.0 * len(l) / n + 0.5)
    for i in xrange(0, n-1):
        yield l[i*newn:i*newn+newn]
    yield l[n*newn-newn:]

l = range(56)
three_chunks = chunks (l, 3)
print three_chunks.next()
print three_chunks.next()
print three_chunks.next()

which outputs:

[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]
[19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37]
[38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55]