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]]

Answer 2

The "naive" solution which I find somewhat readable atleast.

x = [2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 25, 26, 28, 51, 52, 57]

def group(L):
    first = last = L[0]
    for n in L[1:]:
        if n - 1 == last: # Part of the group, bump the end
            last = n
        else: # Not part of the group, yield current group and start a new
            yield first, last
            first = last = n
    yield first, last # Yield the last group


>>>print list(group(x))
[(2, 5), (12, 17), (22, 22), (25, 26), (28, 28), (51, 52), (57, 57)]

Answer 3

more_itertools.consecutive_groups was added in version 4.0.

Demo

import more_itertools as mit


iterable = [2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20]
[list(group) for group in mit.consecutive_groups(iterable)]
# [[2, 3, 4, 5], [12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17], [20]]

Code

Applying this tool, we make a generator function that finds ranges of consecutive numbers.

def find_ranges(iterable):
    """Yield range of consecutive numbers."""
    for group in mit.consecutive_groups(iterable):
        group = list(group)
        if len(group) == 1:
            yield group[0]
        else:
            yield group[0], group[-1]


iterable = [2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20]
list(find_ranges(iterable))
# [(2, 5), (12, 17), 20]

The source implementation emulates a classic recipe (as demonstrated by @Nadia Alramli).

Note: more_itertools is a third-party package installable via pip install more_itertools.

Answer 4

import numpy as np

myarray = [2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20]
sequences = np.split(myarray, np.array(np.where(np.diff(myarray) > 1)[0]) + 1)
l = []
for s in sequences:
    if len(s) > 1:
        l.append((np.min(s), np.max(s)))
    else:
        l.append(s[0])
print(l)

Output:

[(2, 5), (12, 17), 20]

Answer 5

Here's the answer I came up with. I'm writing the code for other people to understand, so I'm fairly verbose with variable names and comments.

First a quick helper function:

def getpreviousitem(mylist,myitem):
    '''Given a list and an item, return previous item in list'''
    for position, item in enumerate(mylist):
        if item == myitem:
            # First item has no previous item
            if position == 0:
                return None
            # Return previous item    
            return mylist[position-1] 

And then the actual code:

def getranges(cpulist):
    '''Given a sorted list of numbers, return a list of ranges'''
    rangelist = []
    inrange = False
    for item in cpulist:
        previousitem = getpreviousitem(cpulist,item)
        if previousitem == item - 1:
            # We're in a range
            if inrange == True:
                # It's an existing range - change the end to the current item
                newrange[1] = item
            else:    
                # We've found a new range.
                newrange = [item-1,item]
            # Update to show we are now in a range    
            inrange = True    
        else:   
            # We were in a range but now it just ended
            if inrange == True:
                # Save the old range
                rangelist.append(newrange)
            # Update to show we're no longer in a range    
            inrange = False 
    # Add the final range found to our list
    if inrange == True:
        rangelist.append(newrange)
    return rangelist

Example run:

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

returns:

[[2, 5], [12, 17]]

Answer 6

The versions by Mark Byers, Andrea Ambu, SilentGhost, Nadia Alramli, and truppo are simple and fast. The 'truppo' version encouraged me to write a version that retains the same nimble behavior while handling step sizes other than 1 (and lists as singletons elements that don't extend more than 1 step with a given step size). It is given here.

>>> list(ranges([1,2,3,4,3,2,1,3,5,7,11,1,2,3]))
[(1, 4, 1), (3, 1, -1), (3, 7, 2), 11, (1, 3, 1)]