Iterable Flattener with Depth.

Pradeep Jindal praddyjindal at gmail.com
Fri Nov 2 16:16:03 EDT 2007


On Friday 02 Nov 2007 10:43:45 pm Ian Clark wrote:
> thebjorn wrote:
> > On Nov 2, 6:32 am, praddy <praddyjin... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Nov 1, 5:03 pm, bearophileH... at lycos.com wrote:
> >>> Pradeep Jindal:
> >>>> Any comments?
> >>>
> >>> Something with similar functionality (plus another 20 utility
> >>> functions/classes or so) has probably to go into the std lib... :-)
> >>> Bye,
> >>> bearophile
> >>
> >> Same Here!
> >>
> >> - Pradeep
> >
> > Yeah, everyone has to write a flatten sooner or later :-)  My version
> > is at:
> >
> >   http://blog.tkbe.org/archive/python-flatten/
> >
> > -- bjorn
>
> And here is mine. Note that it is very similar to Michael Spencer's
> implementation[1]. The only difference is that this adds a depth counter.
>
> def iflat(itr, depth=0):
>    itr = iter(itr)
>    stack = []
>    cur_depth = 0
>
>    while True:
>      try:
>        elem = itr.next()
>        if hasattr(elem, "__iter__") and cur_depth < depth:
>          stack.append(itr)
>          itr = iter(elem)
>          cur_depth += 1
>        else:
>          yield elem
>      except StopIteration:
>        if not stack:
>          raise StopIteration
>        cur_depth -= 1
>        itr = stack.pop()
>
>
> if __name__ == "__main__":
>    test1 = ((0, 1, 2), ((3, 4), 5), (((6, 7), 8), 9))
>    test2 = [1,[2,[3,4,5],'bash'],6,[7,[8,[9,10,['hi', 'hello']]]], 11, 12]
>
>    for x in (test1, test2):
>      print
>      print list(iflat(x))
>      print
>      print list(iflat(x, 1))
>      print list(iflat(x, 2))
>      print list(iflat(x, 3))
>      print list(iflat(x, 4))
>      print iflat(x, 10)
>
> Ian
>
> [1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-March/312022.html

Very nice non-recursive (iterative) implementation of the thing with required 
features. Yours is double faster than mine if depth is not specified, Mine is 
double faster than yours if depth is specified. And my main aim was the depth 
thingy. What do you think?

- Pradeep



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