Question

I want to split a string like:

'aaabbccccabbb'

into

['aaa', 'bb', 'cccc', 'a', 'bbb']

What’s an elegant way to do this in Python? If it makes it easier, it can be assumed that the string will only contain a’s, b’s and c’s.

Answer 1

That is the use case for itertools.groupby 🙂

>>> from itertools import groupby
>>> s = 'aaabbccccabbb'
>>> [''.join(y) for _,y in groupby(s)]
['aaa', 'bb', 'cccc', 'a', 'bbb']