Inspired by @gnibbler's great (but terse!) answer, we can apply that approach to map to multiple partitions:
from collections import defaultdict
def splitter(l, mapper):
"""Split an iterable into multiple partitions generated by a callable mapper."""
results = defaultdict(list)
for x in l:
results[mapper(x)] += [x]
return results
Then splitter
can then be used as follows:
>>> l = [1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 4, 3, 2, 3]
>>> split = splitter(l, lambda x: x % 2 == 0) # partition l into odds and evens
>>> split.items()
>>> [(False, [1, 3, 3, 5, 3, 3]), (True, [2, 4, 2, 4, 6, 4, 2])]
This works for more than two partitions with a more complicated mapping (and on iterators, too):
>>> import math
>>> l = xrange(1, 23)
>>> split = splitter(l, lambda x: int(math.log10(x) * 5))
>>> split.items()
[(0, [1]),
(1, [2]),
(2, [3]),
(3, [4, 5, 6]),
(4, [7, 8, 9]),
(5, [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]),
(6, [16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22])]
Or using a dictionary to map:
>>> map = {'A': 1, 'X': 2, 'B': 3, 'Y': 1, 'C': 2, 'Z': 3}
>>> l = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'C', 'X', 'Y', 'Z', 'A', 'Z']
>>> split = splitter(l, map.get)
>>> split.items()
(1, ['A', 'Y', 'A']), (2, ['C', 'C', 'X']), (3, ['B', 'Z', 'Z'])]
str.split()
, to split the list into an ordered collection of consecutive sub-lists. E.g.split([1,2,3,4,5,3,6], 3) -> ([1,2],[4,5],[6])
, as opposed to dividing a list's elements by category. – AppomattoxIMAGE_TYPES = set('.jpg','.jpeg','.gif','.bmp','.png')
. n(1) instead of n(o/2), with practically no difference in readability. – Deferment