After a while of digging around, I noticed that the core libs don't provide an easy way of splitting a list/tuple into chunks - as per the following discussion:

http://www.aspwinhost.com/In-what-way-do-you-split-an-list-into-evenly-sized-chunks-on-Python/

Therefore, I'd like to +1 feature request this.

Any thoughts??

Cal

This sounds like the grouper() recipe of itertools.  You could try to convince Raymond and see if he wants to include it in itertools.

Oh - and while we are at it - how about having merge_list() and unique_list() as part of the core too??


def unique_list(seq): # Dave Kirby
    # Order preserving
    seen = set()
    return [x for x in seq if x not in seen and not seen.add(x)]
    
def merge_list(seq):
    merged = []
    for s in seq:
        for x in s:
            merged.append(x)
    return merged

Raymond - any thoughts on these 3 requests???

Cal

These have been rejected before.  There is always a trade-off in adding tools such as this -- it can take more time to learn and remember them than to write a trivial piece of code to do it yourself.  Another issue is that people tend to disagree on how to handle an odd sized left-over group -- different use cases require different handling.

We're trying to keep the core toolset reasonably small so that python remains simple and learnable.  That raises the threshold for adding new tools.