Break a list into roughly equaly sized 'columns', e.g. for display in a table.
Python, 8 lines
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Copy to clipboard1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | def colsplit(l, cols):
rows = len(l) / cols
if len(l) % cols:
rows += 1
m = []
for i in range(rows):
m.append(l[i::rows])
return m
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See also: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/425397
Recently a collegue had to split a list of content items into columns, from top to bottom, left to right, for rendering in a HTML table. Example table, for a list of items from 1 to 10:
1 5 9 2 6 10 3 7 4 8
Together we came to this recipe. The trick was to use the third parameter in the slice notation (thanks Guido Wesdorp for the helpful hint!).
>>> l = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>>> columns = 3
>>> colsplit(l, columns)
[[1, 5, 9], [2, 6, 10], [3, 7], [4, 8]]
>>> l = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]
>>> columns = 6
[[1, 4, 7, 10, 13], [2, 5, 8, 11, 14], [3, 6, 9, 12]]
a light modification. def colsplit(l, cols):
....rows,r = divmod(len(l),cols)
....rows += (r!=0)
....m = []
....for i in range(rows):
........m.append(l[i::rows])
....return m
To skew or not to skew... This recepie is quite nice for dividing a sequence for the presentation needed. However, the last sequence could end up containing only one item. If minimizing skew between result sequences is important, see the recepies the author referenced in the discussion.