Struggling for inspiration with lists

[Jean-Michel Pichavant]

----- Original Message -----
> Hi
> 
> I have a list of data that presents as:
> 
> timestamp: value
> 
> Timestamps are used solely to determine the sequence of items in the
> list.
> 
> I want to find the longest repeated sequence of values in the list.
> Example, in the following list:
> 
> data = { 0: "d", 1: "x", 2: "y", 3: "t", 4: "d", 5: "y", 77: "g"' 78:
> "h", 79: "x", 80: "y", 206: "t", 210: "d", 211: "x" }
> 
> I would pull out the sequence x-y-t-d (starting at 1 and 79)
> 
> I need to keep the timestamp / data association because I need to
> generate output that identifies (a) the longest repeated sequence (b)
> how
> many elements in the longest repeated sequence (c) at what timestamps
> each occurrence started.
> 
> I'm not sure of the best way, programatically, to aproach this task,
> which means I'm unsure whether eg a list of tuples ( time, data ) or
> an
> OrderedDict keyed on the timestamp is the best starting point.
> 
> I can make a list of tuples using:
> 
> d = [ (k,v) for k,v in data ]
> 
> and with the list of tuples, I can do something like:
> 
> d.sort( key=lambda tup: tup[0] )
> 
> max_start_a = 0
> max_start_b = 0
> max_len = 0
> i = 0
> 
> while i < len( d ):
> 
>   j = i + 1
> 
>   while j < len( d ):
> 
>     o = 0
> 
>     while j+o < len( d ) and d[i+o][1] == d[j+o][1]:
> 
>       o += 1
> 
>       if o > max_len:
> 
>         max_len = 0
>         max_start_a = i
>         max_start_b = j
> 
>     j += 1
> 
>   i += 1
> 
> print d[max_start_a][0], d[max_start_b][0], max_len
> 
> Is there a better way to do this?
> 
> --
> Denis McMahon, denismfmcmahon at gmail.com

Hi,

Depends on what you're meaning by better.
If you mean quicker, it seems there is an algorithm in O(n). http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11090289/find-longest-repetitive-sequence-in-a-string
You'll need a little bit of work to move from dict / to string / to dict but that shouldn't be a problem.

If you didn't mean quicker, I have no idea. If your current code is working, I don't see how it would such wrong that you'd need to change it.

JM


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