Generator for splitting list in N chunks

Question

for i in generate_chunks([1, 2, 3, 4, 5], 2):

    print(i)



# [[1], [2, 3, 4, 5]]

# [[1, 2], [3, 4, 5]]

# [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5]]

# [[1, 2, 3, 4], [5]]





for i in generate_chunks([1, 2, 3, 4, 5], 3):

    print(i)



# [[1], [2], [3, 4, 5]]

# [[1, 2], [3], [4, 5]]

# [[1, 2, 3], [4], [5]]

# [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5]]

# ...

How can I implement
generate_chunks(list, n)
?

Essentially what

generate_chunks

does is splitting

list

in

n

chunks and yield a list of these chunks.

For clarification,

n

refers to the number of chunks, not the length of the chunks.

The order in which those lists of chunks are yielded is irrelevant, however the order of the elements in the initial list is important, so that for a given list

[1, 2, 3]

the result

[[1], 2, 3]]

would be valid whereas

[[1], [3, 2]

would be invalid.

(Preferably without using a 3rd-party library)

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Answer 1

Here is an itertools based approach:

import itertools

def chunks(items, cutpoints):
    return [items[i:j] for i,j in zip([0] + cutpoints, cutpoints + [len(items)])]

def generate_chunks(items, n):
    indices = range(1,len(items))
    for cutpoints in itertools.combinations(indices,n-1):
        yield chunks(items,list(cutpoints))

For example:

>>> for c in generate_chunks([1,2,3,4,5],4): print(c)

[[1], [2], [3], [4, 5]]
[[1], [2], [3, 4], [5]]
[[1], [2, 3], [4], [5]]
[[1, 2], [3], [4], [5]]

Generator for splitting list in N chunks

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