Howto bin series of float values into histogram in Python?

Question

I have set of value in float (always less than 0). Which I want to bin into histogram, i,e. each bar in histogram contain range of value [0,0.150)

The data I have looks like this:

0.000
0.005
0.124
0.000
0.004
0.000
0.111
0.112

Whith my code below I expect to get result that looks like

[0, 0.005) 5
[0.005, 0.011) 0
...etc.. 

I tried to do do such binning with this code of mine. But it doesn't seem to work. What's the right way to do it?

#! /usr/bin/env python


import fileinput, math

log2 = math.log(2)

def getBin(x):
    return int(math.log(x+1)/log2)

diffCounts = [0] * 5

for line in fileinput.input():
    words = line.split()
    diff = float(words[0]) * 1000;

    diffCounts[ str(getBin(diff)) ] += 1

maxdiff = [i for i, c in enumerate(diffCounts) if c > 0][-1]
print maxdiff
maxBin = max(maxdiff)


for i in range(maxBin+1):
     lo = 2**i - 1
     hi = 2**(i+1) - 1
     binStr = '[' + str(lo) + ',' + str(hi) + ')'
     print binStr + '\t' + '\t'.join(map(str, (diffCounts[i])))

~

Answer 1

When possible, don't reinvent the wheel. NumPy has everything you need:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import numpy as np

a = np.fromfile(open('file', 'r'), sep='\n')
# [ 0.     0.005  0.124  0.     0.004  0.     0.111  0.112]

# You can set arbitrary bin edges:
bins = [0, 0.150]
hist, bin_edges = np.histogram(a, bins=bins)
# hist: [8]
# bin_edges: [ 0.    0.15]

# Or, if bin is an integer, you can set the number of bins:
bins = 4
hist, bin_edges = np.histogram(a, bins=bins)
# hist: [5 0 0 3]
# bin_edges: [ 0.     0.031  0.062  0.093  0.124]