Splitting a list into N parts of approximately equal length

Question

You can write it fairly simply as a list generator:

def split(a, n):
    k, m = divmod(len(a), n)
    return (a[i*k+min(i, m):(i+1)*k+min(i+1, m)] for i in range(n))

Example:

>>> list(split(range(11), 3))
[[0, 1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6, 7], [8, 9, 10]]

This is the raison d'être for numpy.array_split*:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> print(*np.array_split(range(10), 3))
[0 1 2 3] [4 5 6] [7 8 9]
>>> print(*np.array_split(range(10), 4))
[0 1 2] [3 4 5] [6 7] [8 9]
>>> print(*np.array_split(range(10), 5))
[0 1] [2 3] [4 5] [6 7] [8 9]

_{*credit to Zero Piraeus in room 6}

As long as you don't want anything silly like continuous chunks:

>>> def chunkify(lst,n):
...     return [lst[i::n] for i in xrange(n)]
... 
>>> chunkify(range(13), 3)
[[0, 3, 6, 9, 12], [1, 4, 7, 10], [2, 5, 8, 11]]

This code is broken due to rounding errors. Do not use it!!!

assert len(chunkIt([1,2,3], 10)) == 10  # fails

---

Here's one that could work:

def chunkIt(seq, num):
    avg = len(seq) / float(num)
    out = []
    last = 0.0

    while last < len(seq):
        out.append(seq[int(last):int(last + avg)])
        last += avg

    return out

Testing:

>>> chunkIt(range(10), 3)
[[0, 1, 2], [3, 4, 5], [6, 7, 8, 9]]
>>> chunkIt(range(11), 3)
[[0, 1, 2], [3, 4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9, 10]]
>>> chunkIt(range(12), 3)
[[0, 1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6, 7], [8, 9, 10, 11]]

Changing the code to yield n chunks rather than chunks of n:

def chunks(l, n):
    """ Yield n successive chunks from l.
    """
    newn = int(len(l) / n)
    for i in xrange(0, n-1):
        yield l[i*newn:i*newn+newn]
    yield l[n*newn-newn:]

l = range(56)
three_chunks = chunks (l, 3)
print three_chunks.next()
print three_chunks.next()
print three_chunks.next()

which gives:

[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17]
[18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35]
[36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55]

This will assign the extra elements to the final group which is not perfect but well within your specification of "roughly N equal parts" :-) By that, I mean 56 elements would be better as (19,19,18) whereas this gives (18,18,20).

You can get the more balanced output with the following code:

#!/usr/bin/python
def chunks(l, n):
    """ Yield n successive chunks from l.
    """
    newn = int(1.0 * len(l) / n + 0.5)
    for i in xrange(0, n-1):
        yield l[i*newn:i*newn+newn]
    yield l[n*newn-newn:]

l = range(56)
three_chunks = chunks (l, 3)
print three_chunks.next()
print three_chunks.next()
print three_chunks.next()

which outputs:

[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]
[19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37]
[38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55]