Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-14 Thread Frank Millman

Benji York wrote:
 Frank Millman wrote:
  reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
  rows = []
  for row in reader:
  rows.append(row)

 Why do you create a list of rows instead of just iterating over the
 reader directly?
 --
 Benji York

A - didn't think of it - good idea

B - can't always do it -
B1 - if the file is not sorted, I have to sort the rows first
B2 - if I need to update the file, I can modify the rows in place, and
then call
csv.writer(open('trans.csv','wb')).writerows(rows)

BTW, I know that B2 is simplistic - to be safe I should rename, then
write, then unlink. I will do that for production code.

BTW2, an alternative to B2 is
reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
newtrans = open('newtrans.csv','wb')
writer = csv.writer(newtrans)
for row in reader:
[process and modify row]
writer.writerow(row)
newtrans.close()
[unlink and rename]

Could be useful if the file is large. Food for thought.

Thanks

Frank

-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-14 Thread Alex Martelli
Frank Millman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Benji York wrote:
  Frank Millman wrote:
   reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
   rows = []
   for row in reader:
   rows.append(row)
 
  Why do you create a list of rows instead of just iterating over the
  reader directly?
  --
  Benji York
 
 A - didn't think of it - good idea
 
 B - can't always do it -
 B1 - if the file is not sorted, I have to sort the rows first
 B2 - if I need to update the file, I can modify the rows in place, and
 then call
 csv.writer(open('trans.csv','wb')).writerows(rows)
 
 BTW, I know that B2 is simplistic - to be safe I should rename, then
 write, then unlink. I will do that for production code.
 
 BTW2, an alternative to B2 is
 reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
 newtrans = open('newtrans.csv','wb')
 writer = csv.writer(newtrans)
 for row in reader:
 [process and modify row]
 writer.writerow(row)
 newtrans.close()
 [unlink and rename]
 
 Could be useful if the file is large. Food for thought.

BTW, if and when you do need a list for some other purpose,

rows = list(reader)

may be slightly better than the for/append loop; and if you need a
sorted list, perhaps

rows = sorted(reader)

similarly.


Alex
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-14 Thread Alex Martelli
James Stroud [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
   ...
 def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
  if len(doers)  1:
doit(alist, doers[1:], i+1)
  doers[0](r)

Isn't this making N useless slices (thus copies, for most kinds of
sequences) for a doers of length N?  Since you're passing i anyway, it
seems to me that:

def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
  if len(doers)  i+1:
 doit(alist, doers, i+1)
  doers[i](r)

is equivalent to your code, but avoids these slices (thus copies).


Alex
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-14 Thread James Stroud
Alex Martelli wrote:
 James Stroud [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
...
 
def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
   for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
 if len(doers)  1:
   doit(alist, doers[1:], i+1)
 doers[0](r)
 
 
 Isn't this making N useless slices (thus copies, for most kinds of
 sequences) for a doers of length N?  Since you're passing i anyway, it
 seems to me that:
 
 def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
 for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
   if len(doers)  i+1:
  doit(alist, doers, i+1)
   doers[i](r)
 
 is equivalent to your code, but avoids these slices (thus copies).
 
 
 Alex

Yes, it does seem the copies are useless. Thank you.

James

-- 
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-14 Thread James Stroud
Alex Martelli wrote:
 James Stroud [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
...
 
def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
   for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
 if len(doers)  1:
   doit(alist, doers[1:], i+1)
 doers[0](r)
 
 
 Isn't this making N useless slices (thus copies, for most kinds of
 sequences) for a doers of length N?  Since you're passing i anyway, it
 seems to me that:
 
 def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
 for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
   if len(doers)  i+1:
  doit(alist, doers, i+1)
   doers[i](r)
 
 is equivalent to your code, but avoids these slices (thus copies).
 
 
 Alex

Actually, I remember why I wrote it that way--because the itemgetter 
argument may not start at zero (admitting that I haven't yet played with 
itemgetter at all). Maybe pop(0) is better than a copy?


def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
   for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
 doer = doers.pop(0)
 if doers:  # empty list tests as False
doit(alist, doers, i+1)
 doer(r)


James

-- 
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-14 Thread Alex Martelli
James Stroud [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Alex Martelli wrote:
  James Stroud [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 ...
  
 def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
  if len(doers)  1:
doit(alist, doers[1:], i+1)
  doers[0](r)
  
  
  Isn't this making N useless slices (thus copies, for most kinds of
  sequences) for a doers of length N?  Since you're passing i anyway, it
  seems to me that:
  
  def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
  for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
if len(doers)  i+1:
   doit(alist, doers, i+1)
doers[i](r)
  
  is equivalent to your code, but avoids these slices (thus copies).
  
  
  Alex
 
 Actually, I remember why I wrote it that way--because the itemgetter 
 argument may not start at zero (admitting that I haven't yet played with
 itemgetter at all). Maybe pop(0) is better than a copy?
 
 
 def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
  doer = doers.pop(0)
  if doers:  # empty list tests as False
 doit(alist, doers, i+1)
  doer(r)

No, doers.pop(0) is O(N), just like the slicing doers[1:].

To support the indexing into itemgetter possibly being different from
that into doers (under the hypothesis that efficiency matters here, of
course!-) I'd rather do something like:

def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
L = len(doers)
def _aux(rows, j):
if L = j: return
doer = doers[j]
for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i+j)):
_aux(alist, j+1)
doer(r)
_aux(rows, 0)

haven't tested this, but it seems a straightforward semantics-preserving
transformation -- the hoisting out of the recursion of the computation
of len(), and out of the loop of the termination-test and indexing,
being trivial optimizations (which I'm not averse to using, even though
trivial, because I think they make the code clearer.

Whether all this is worth it, or not, is in a sense besides the point --
I like this anyway, even just as an example of how the best way to
introduce recursion may often be, not in the official function (the
one that gets called by client code), but in a private auxiliary
function inside the official one.


Alex
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread vpr
Hi Frank

This is one of the reasons why I love Python, you can write readable
code.
I strive to write clean code but I find that exception handling code
e.g. try:
makes my code ugly and significantly harder to read. Does anyone have
any good
pointers for a former C++ / Perl coder.

/vpr


Frank Millman wrote:
 Hi all

 This is probably old hat to most of you, but for me it was a
 revelation, so I thought I would share it in case someone has a similar
 requirement.

 I had to convert an old program that does a traditional pass through a
 sorted data file, breaking on a change of certain fields, processing
 each row, accumulating various totals, and doing additional processing
 at each break. I am not using a database for this one, as the file
 sizes are not large - a few thousand rows at most. I am using csv
 files, and using the csv module so that each row is nicely formatted
 into a list.

 The traditional approach is quite fiddly, saving the values of the
 various break fields, comparing the values on each row with the saved
 values, and taking action if the values differ. The more break fields
 there are, the fiddlier it gets.

 I was going to do the same in python, but then I vaguely remembered
 reading about 'groupby'. It took a little while to figure it out, but
 once I had cracked it, it transformed the task into one of utter
 simplicity.

 Here is an example. Imagine a transaction file sorted by branch,
 account number, and date, and you want to break on all three.

 -
 import csv
 from itertools import groupby
 from operator import itemgetter

 BRN = 0
 ACC = 1
 DATE = 2

 reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
 rows = []
 for row in reader:
 rows.append(row)

 for brn,brnList in groupby(rows,itemgetter(BRN)):
 for acc,accList in groupby(brnList,itemgetter(ACC)):
 for date,dateList in groupby(accList,itemgetter(DATE)):
 for row in dateList:
 [do something with row]
 [do something on change of date]
 [do something on change of acc]
 [do something on change of brn]
 -
 
 Hope someone finds this of interest.
 
 Frank Millman

-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread Paul McGuire

 reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
 rows = []
 for row in reader:
 rows.append(row)


This is untested, but you might think about converting your explicit for...
append loop into either a list comp,

rows = [row for row in reader]

or just a plain list constructor:

rows = list(reader)

Neh?

-- Paul


(Oh, and I like groupby too!  Combine it with sort to quickly create
histograms.)

# tally a histogram of a list of values from 1-10
dataValueRange = range(1,11)
data = [random.choice(dataValueRange) for i in xrange(1)]

hist = [ (k,len(list(g))) for k,g in itertools.groupby(sorted(data)) ]
print hist

histAsDict = dict((k,len(list(g))) for k,g in
itertools.groupby(sorted(data)))
print histAsDict

Gives:

[(1, 979), (2, 1034), (3, 985), (4, 969), (5, 1020), (6, 975), (7, 981), (8,
1070), (9, 1003), (10, 984)]
{1: 979, 2: 1034, 3: 985, 4: 969, 5: 1020, 6: 975, 7: 981, 8: 1070, 9: 1003,
10: 984}


-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread Frank Millman

Paul McGuire wrote:
 
  reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
  rows = []
  for row in reader:
  rows.append(row)
 

 This is untested, but you might think about converting your explicit for...
 append loop into either a list comp,

 rows = [row for row in reader]

 or just a plain list constructor:

 rows = list(reader)

 Neh?

 -- Paul


Yup, they both work fine.

There may be times when you want to massage the data before appending
it, in which case you obviously have to do it the long way. Otherwise
these are definitely neater, the last one especially.

You could even do it as a one-liner -
rows = list(csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb')))

It still looks perfectly readable to me.

Thanks

Frank

-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread geskerrett
Frank;
I would just like to thank-you for this timely post.
I am working on a reporting project that needed groupby functionality
and I was going to sit down this morning to rework some very ugly
code into some not quite so ugly code.

Your post got me pointed to in the right direction and the end
results will be much more flexible and ALOT more maintainable.

Thanks.

-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread Benji York
Frank Millman wrote:
 reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
 rows = []
 for row in reader:
 rows.append(row)

Why do you create a list of rows instead of just iterating over the 
reader directly?
--
Benji York
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread James Stroud
Frank Millman wrote:
 Hi all
 
 This is probably old hat to most of you, but for me it was a
 revelation, so I thought I would share it in case someone has a similar
 requirement.
 
 I had to convert an old program that does a traditional pass through a
 sorted data file, breaking on a change of certain fields, processing
 each row, accumulating various totals, and doing additional processing
 at each break. I am not using a database for this one, as the file
 sizes are not large - a few thousand rows at most. I am using csv
 files, and using the csv module so that each row is nicely formatted
 into a list.
 
 The traditional approach is quite fiddly, saving the values of the
 various break fields, comparing the values on each row with the saved
 values, and taking action if the values differ. The more break fields
 there are, the fiddlier it gets.
 
 I was going to do the same in python, but then I vaguely remembered
 reading about 'groupby'. It took a little while to figure it out, but
 once I had cracked it, it transformed the task into one of utter
 simplicity.
 
 Here is an example. Imagine a transaction file sorted by branch,
 account number, and date, and you want to break on all three.
 
 -
 import csv
 from itertools import groupby
 from operator import itemgetter
 
 BRN = 0
 ACC = 1
 DATE = 2
 
 reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
 rows = []
 for row in reader:
 rows.append(row)
 
 for brn,brnList in groupby(rows,itemgetter(BRN)):
 for acc,accList in groupby(brnList,itemgetter(ACC)):
 for date,dateList in groupby(accList,itemgetter(DATE)):
 for row in dateList:
 [do something with row]
 [do something on change of date]
 [do something on change of acc]
 [do something on change of brn]
 -
 
 Hope someone finds this of interest.
 
 Frank Millman
 

I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of flac on this list for proposing to 
turn nested for-loops into a recursive function, but I couldn't help 
myself. This seems more simple to me, but for others it may be difficult 
to look at, and these people will undoubtedly complain.


import csv
from itertools import groupby
from operator import itemgetter

reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
rows = []
for row in reader:
 rows.append(row)

def brn_doer(row):
   [doing something with brn here]

def acc_doer(date):
   [you get the idea]

[etc.]

doers = [brn_doer, acc_doer, date_doer, row_doer]

def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
   for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
 doit(alist, doers[1:], i+1)
 doers[0](r)

doit(rows, doers, 0)

Now all of those ugly for loops become one recursive function. Bear in 
mind, its not all that 'elegant', but it looks nicer, is more succinct, 
abstracts the process, and scales to arbitrary depth. Tragically, 
however, it has been generalized, which is likely to raise some hackles 
here. And, oh yes, it didn't answer exactly your question (which you 
didn't really have). I'm sure I will regret this becuase, as you will 
find, suggesting code on this list with additional utility is somewhat 
discouraged by the vociferous few who make a religion out of 'import this'.

Also, I still have no idea what 'groupby' does. It looks interesting 
thgough, thanks for pointing it out.

James

-- 
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread James Stroud
James Stroud wrote:
 Frank Millman wrote:
 
 Hi all

 This is probably old hat to most of you, but for me it was a
 revelation, so I thought I would share it in case someone has a similar
 requirement.

 I had to convert an old program that does a traditional pass through a
 sorted data file, breaking on a change of certain fields, processing
 each row, accumulating various totals, and doing additional processing
 at each break. I am not using a database for this one, as the file
 sizes are not large - a few thousand rows at most. I am using csv
 files, and using the csv module so that each row is nicely formatted
 into a list.

 The traditional approach is quite fiddly, saving the values of the
 various break fields, comparing the values on each row with the saved
 values, and taking action if the values differ. The more break fields
 there are, the fiddlier it gets.

 I was going to do the same in python, but then I vaguely remembered
 reading about 'groupby'. It took a little while to figure it out, but
 once I had cracked it, it transformed the task into one of utter
 simplicity.

 Here is an example. Imagine a transaction file sorted by branch,
 account number, and date, and you want to break on all three.

 -
 import csv
 from itertools import groupby
 from operator import itemgetter

 BRN = 0
 ACC = 1
 DATE = 2

 reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
 rows = []
 for row in reader:
 rows.append(row)

 for brn,brnList in groupby(rows,itemgetter(BRN)):
 for acc,accList in groupby(brnList,itemgetter(ACC)):
 for date,dateList in groupby(accList,itemgetter(DATE)):
 for row in dateList:
 [do something with row]
 [do something on change of date]
 [do something on change of acc]
 [do something on change of brn]
 -

 Hope someone finds this of interest.

 Frank Millman

 
 I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of flac on this list for proposing to 
 turn nested for-loops into a recursive function, but I couldn't help 
 myself. This seems more simple to me, but for others it may be difficult 
 to look at, and these people will undoubtedly complain.
 
 
 import csv
 from itertools import groupby
 from operator import itemgetter
 
 reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
 rows = []
 for row in reader:
 rows.append(row)
 
 def brn_doer(row):
   [doing something with brn here]
 
 def acc_doer(date):
   [you get the idea]
 
 [etc.]
 
 doers = [brn_doer, acc_doer, date_doer, row_doer]
 
 def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
   for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
 doit(alist, doers[1:], i+1)
 doers[0](r)
 
 doit(rows, doers, 0)
 
 Now all of those ugly for loops become one recursive function. Bear in 
 mind, its not all that 'elegant', but it looks nicer, is more succinct, 
 abstracts the process, and scales to arbitrary depth. Tragically, 
 however, it has been generalized, which is likely to raise some hackles 
 here. And, oh yes, it didn't answer exactly your question (which you 
 didn't really have). I'm sure I will regret this becuase, as you will 
 find, suggesting code on this list with additional utility is somewhat 
 discouraged by the vociferous few who make a religion out of 'import this'.
 
 Also, I still have no idea what 'groupby' does. It looks interesting 
 thgough, thanks for pointing it out.
 
 James
 

Forgot to test for stopping condition:


def doit(rows, doers, i=0):
   for r, alist in groupby(rows, itemgetter(i)):
 if len(doers)  1:
   doit(alist, doers[1:], i+1)
 doers[0](r)

-- 
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread Jon Clements
Not related to itertools.groupby, but the csv.reader object...

If for some reason you have malformed CSV files, with embedded newlines
or something of that effect, it will raise an exception. To skip those,
you will need a construct of something like this:

raw_csv_in = file('filenamehere.csv')
for raw_line in raw_csv_in:
try:
# Do something to rawline here maybe if necessary to clean it
up
row = csv.reader( [raw_line] ).next()
# Do your stuff here
except csv.Error:
pass # or do something more appropriate if the record is
important

May not be applicable in your case, but has stung me a few times...

All the best,

Jon.


Frank Millman wrote:
 Paul McGuire wrote:
  
   reader = csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb'))
   rows = []
   for row in reader:
   rows.append(row)
  
 
  This is untested, but you might think about converting your explicit for...
  append loop into either a list comp,
 
  rows = [row for row in reader]
 
  or just a plain list constructor:
 
  rows = list(reader)
 
  Neh?
 
  -- Paul
 

 Yup, they both work fine.

 There may be times when you want to massage the data before appending
 it, in which case you obviously have to do it the long way. Otherwise
 these are definitely neater, the last one especially.

 You could even do it as a one-liner -
 rows = list(csv.reader(open('trans.csv', 'rb')))
 
 It still looks perfectly readable to me.
 
 Thanks
 
 Frank

-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread John Machin
On 13/06/2006 6:28 PM, Paul McGuire wrote:

 (Oh, and I like groupby too!  Combine it with sort to quickly create
 histograms.)
 
 # tally a histogram of a list of values from 1-10
 dataValueRange = range(1,11)
 data = [random.choice(dataValueRange) for i in xrange(1)]
 
 hist = [ (k,len(list(g))) for k,g in itertools.groupby(sorted(data)) ]

That len(list(g)) looks like it uses O(N) memory just to find out what N 
is :-(

The best I could come up with is sum(itertools.imap(lambda x: 1, g)) -- 
but that does look a bit ugly ...

-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread Gary Herron
John Machin wrote:
 On 13/06/2006 6:28 PM, Paul McGuire wrote:

   
 (Oh, and I like groupby too!  Combine it with sort to quickly create
 histograms.)

 # tally a histogram of a list of values from 1-10
 dataValueRange = range(1,11)
 data = [random.choice(dataValueRange) for i in xrange(1)]

 hist = [ (k,len(list(g))) for k,g in itertools.groupby(sorted(data)) ]
 

 That len(list(g)) looks like it uses O(N) memory just to find out what N 
 is :-(
   
Not at all! A python list *knows* its length at all times. len() is a
constant time lookup of an internal attribute.

Gary Herron

 The best I could come up with is sum(itertools.imap(lambda x: 1, g)) -- 
 but that does look a bit ugly ...

   

-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread John Machin
On 14/06/2006 8:06 AM, Gary Herron wrote:
 John Machin wrote:
 On 13/06/2006 6:28 PM, Paul McGuire wrote:

   
 (Oh, and I like groupby too!  Combine it with sort to quickly create
 histograms.)

 # tally a histogram of a list of values from 1-10
 dataValueRange = range(1,11)
 data = [random.choice(dataValueRange) for i in xrange(1)]

 hist = [ (k,len(list(g))) for k,g in itertools.groupby(sorted(data)) ]
 
 That len(list(g)) looks like it uses O(N) memory just to find out what N 
 is :-(
   
 Not at all! A python list *knows* its length at all times. len() is a
 constant time lookup of an internal attribute.

Did you see any reference to time in what I wrote? Did you notice the 
word memory at all?

My point is that g is an iterator, and list(g) actually builds a list 
of size N, merely in order to use len(that_list) to count the number of 
items that g will produce.
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread Robert Kern
Gary Herron wrote:
 John Machin wrote:
 
On 13/06/2006 6:28 PM, Paul McGuire wrote:

(Oh, and I like groupby too!  Combine it with sort to quickly create
histograms.)

# tally a histogram of a list of values from 1-10
dataValueRange = range(1,11)
data = [random.choice(dataValueRange) for i in xrange(1)]

hist = [ (k,len(list(g))) for k,g in itertools.groupby(sorted(data)) ]

That len(list(g)) looks like it uses O(N) memory just to find out what N 
is :-(
 
 Not at all! A python list *knows* its length at all times. len() is a
 constant time lookup of an internal attribute.

The point is that you had to create the list in the first place. g is an 
iterator.

-- 
Robert Kern

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth.
  -- Umberto Eco

-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread John Machin
On 14/06/2006 8:38 AM, Robert Kern wrote:
 Gary Herron wrote:
 John Machin wrote:

 On 13/06/2006 6:28 PM, Paul McGuire wrote:

 (Oh, and I like groupby too!  Combine it with sort to quickly create
 histograms.)

 # tally a histogram of a list of values from 1-10
 dataValueRange = range(1,11)
 data = [random.choice(dataValueRange) for i in xrange(1)]

 hist = [ (k,len(list(g))) for k,g in itertools.groupby(sorted(data)) ]
 That len(list(g)) looks like it uses O(N) memory just to find out what N 
 is :-(
 Not at all! A python list *knows* its length at all times. len() is a
 constant time lookup of an internal attribute.
 
 The point is that you had to create the list in the first place. g is an 
 iterator.
 

I didn't have to create a list in the first place. Paul did. The point 
of my post was to avoid the memory grab caused by list(g) by seeking a 
way that just counted g's output.

Sorry for the confusion my lack of clarity has evidently caused. I'll 
rephrase:

That whole construct
 len(list(g))
looks like it uses O(N) memory just to find out what N is.
Better?
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Re: groupby is brilliant!

2006-06-13 Thread Paul McGuire
John Machin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 On 14/06/2006 8:38 AM, Robert Kern wrote:
  Gary Herron wrote:
  John Machin wrote:
 
  On 13/06/2006 6:28 PM, Paul McGuire wrote:
 
  (Oh, and I like groupby too!  Combine it with sort to quickly create
  histograms.)
 
  # tally a histogram of a list of values from 1-10
  dataValueRange = range(1,11)
  data = [random.choice(dataValueRange) for i in xrange(1)]
 
  hist = [ (k,len(list(g))) for k,g in
itertools.groupby(sorted(data)) ]
  That len(list(g)) looks like it uses O(N) memory just to find out what
N
  is :-(
  Not at all! A python list *knows* its length at all times. len() is a
  constant time lookup of an internal attribute.
 
  The point is that you had to create the list in the first place. g is an
iterator.
 

 I didn't have to create a list in the first place. Paul did. The point
 of my post was to avoid the memory grab caused by list(g) by seeking a
 way that just counted g's output.

 Sorry for the confusion my lack of clarity has evidently caused. I'll
 rephrase:

 That whole construct
  len(list(g))
 looks like it uses O(N) memory just to find out what N is.
 Better?

Ok, ok!!!  Here's a non-O(N) memory allocation, using a generator expression
to count the number of items in the list.

hist = [ (k,sum(1 for _g in g)) for k,g in itertools.groupby(sorted(data)) ]

-- Paul


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