Hi, I have to read through a file that will give me a bunch of intervals. My ultimate goal is to produce a final set of intervals such that not two intervals overlap by more than N, where N is a predetermined length.
For example, I could read through this input: (1,10), (3,15), (20,30),(29,40),(51,65),(62,100),(50,66) btw, the input is not guaranteed to be in any sorted order. say N = 5, so the final set should be (1,15), (20, 30), (29, 40), (50, 100) Is there already some existing code in Python that I can easily take advantage of to produce this? Right now I've written my own simple solution, which is just to maintain a list of the intervals. I can use the Interval module, but it doesn't really affect much. I read one interval from the input file at a time, and use bisect to insert it in order. The problem comes with merging, which sometimes can be cascading. ex: read (51,65) ==> put (51,65) in list read (62,100) ==> put (62,100) in list (overlap only be 4 <= N) read (50,66) ==> merge with (51,65) to become (50,66) ==> now can merge with (62,100) Of course I can check for cascading merges by pivoting around the position where the insertion would've taken place...but just wondering, is there some other nice way to do this? I also intuitively don't sense a need for using trees, unless someone's already written it, the interface is easy to use, and it won't result in more insert/ delete/structure changes that nullifies its beauty...(also I'm not using the output list for searching) Thanks in advance. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
