Splitting list into smaller lists of equal values

Question

I am looking to transform a list into smaller lists of equal values. An example I have is:

[\"a\", \"a\", \"a\", \"b\", \"b\", \"c\", \"c\", \"c\", \"c\"] 
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Answer 1

You could use collections.Counter

>>> lst = ["a", "a", "a", "b", "b", "c", "c", "c", "c"]
>>> import collections
>>> collections.Counter(lst).most_common()
[('c', 4), ('a', 3), ('b', 2)]

This works even when the values are not ordered and provides a very compact representation which then you could expand if needed into lists:

>>> [[i]*n for i,n in collections.Counter(lst).most_common()]
[['c', 'c', 'c', 'c'], ['a', 'a', 'a'], ['b', 'b']]