Question

I have a sumranges() function, which sums all the ranges of consecutive numbers found in a tuple of tuples. To illustrate:

def sumranges(nums):
    return sum([sum([1 for j in range(len(nums[i])) if
                     nums[i][j] == 0 or
                     nums[i][j - 1] + 1 != nums[i][j]]) for
                i in range(len(nums))])

>>> nums = ((1, 2, 3, 4), (1, 5, 6), (19, 20, 24, 29, 400))
>>> print sumranges(nums)
7

As you can see, it returns the number of ranges of consecutive digits within the tuple, that is: len((1, 2, 3, 4), (1), (5, 6), (19, 20), (24), (29), (400)) = 7. The tuples are always ordered.

My problem is that my sumranges() is terrible. I hate looking at it. I’m currently just iterating through the tuple and each subtuple, assigning a 1 if the number is not (1 + previous number), and summing the total. I feel like I am missing a much easier way to accomplish my stated objective. Does anyone know a more pythonic way to do this?

Edit: I have benchmarked all the answers given thus far. Thanks to all of you for your answers.

The benchmarking code is as follows, using a sample size of 100K:

from time import time
from random import randrange
nums = [sorted(list(set(randrange(1, 10) for i in range(10)))) for
        j in range(100000)]

for func in sumranges, alex, matt, redglyph, ephemient, ferdinand:
    start = time()
    result = func(nums)
    end = time()
    print ', '.join([func.__name__, str(result), str(end - start) + ' s'])

Results are as follows. Actual answer shown to verify that all functions return the correct answer:

sumranges, 250281, 0.54171204567 s
alex, 250281, 0.531121015549 s
matt, 250281, 0.843333005905 s
redglyph, 250281, 0.366822004318 s
ephemient, 250281, 0.805964946747 s
ferdinand, 250281, 0.405596971512 s

RedGlyph does edge out in terms of speed, but the simplest answer is probably Ferdinand’s, and probably wins for most pythonic.

Answer 1

My 2 cents:

>>> sum(len(set(x - i for i, x in enumerate(t))) for t in nums)
7

It’s basically the same idea as descriped in Alex’ post, but using a set instead of itertools.groupby, resulting in a shorter expression. Since sets are implemented in C and len() of a set runs in constant time, this should also be pretty fast.