Python List Group by Date

Question

Say I have a list looks like this:

[(datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 8, 1, 20, 15), 2060), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 9, 1, 6, 14), 2055), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 9, 1, 21, 1), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 10, 1, 5, 49), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 10, 1, 19, 51), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 11, 2, 4, 53), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 12, 0, 29, 45), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 12, 0, 44, 13), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 13, 0, 34, 13), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 13, 0, 47, 29), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 14, 1, 30, 39), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 14, 1, 33, 51), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 15, 0, 41, 1), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 15, 0, 54, 45), 2050), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 16, 0, 29, 57), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 16, 0, 43, 11), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 17, 0, 27, 4), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 17, 0, 42, 30), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 18, 0, 26, 26), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 18, 0, 43, 11), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 19, 0, 41, 49), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 20, 1, 10, 23), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 20, 1, 23, 44), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 21, 0, 47, 25), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 21, 1, 0, 12), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 22, 0, 45, 21), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 22, 1, 4, 33), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 23, 0, 51, 27), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 23, 1, 6, 36), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 24, 0, 41, 3), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 24, 0, 53, 14), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 25, 0, 29, 24), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 25, 0, 42, 40), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 26, 0, 28, 13), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 26, 0, 43, 30), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 27, 0, 30, 1), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 27, 0, 43, 43), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 28, 0, 33, 19), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 28, 0, 49, 11), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 29, 0, 26, 49), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 29, 0, 41, 21), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 30, 0, 26, 13), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 30, 0, 42, 9), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 31, 0, 23, 40), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 31, 0, 39, 49), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 1, 0, 22, 2), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 1, 0, 38, 16), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 2, 0, 21, 2), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 2, 0, 36, 19), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 3, 0, 22, 16), 1950), (datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 3, 0, 39, 2), 1900)]

clearly you could see that this is a list of tuple and the first element in each tuple is a timestamp. Already in good format, generated by:

datetime.strptime(record[0], timeFormat)

And the second element is the monitoring value. However, there might be multiple records in each day. For example, there are two records on datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 9..), which have two different values 2055 and 2050. What I want is the actually the maximum in each day. So in this case. 2055 would be the only records for (2013, 8, 9).

I am wondering would there be a handy way in Python to do that. Some thing similar like mysql:

select 
    date(timestamp), 
    max(value)
from table 
group by date(timestamp)

The mysql statement is just to show the idea and I definitely want a python solution.

Answer 1

Use itertools.groupby:

>>> records = [(datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 8, 1, 20, 15), 2060), ....]
>>> import itertools
>>> [(dt, max(v for d, v in grp)) for dt, grp in itertools.groupby(records, key=lambda x: x[0].date())]
[(datetime.date(2013, 8, 8), 2060),
 (datetime.date(2013, 8, 9), 2055),
 (datetime.date(2013, 8, 10), 2050),
 ...
]

NOTE: assumed that the records are sorted. If not, you should sort them first by dates.