How to Divide a List into Nearly Equal Parts in Python?

Dividing a List into Nearly Equal Parts

Dividing a list into equal parts is a common task in programming. The built-in chunks() method in Python offers a way to split a list into equally sized chunks, but what if you want to divide the list into roughly equal parts instead?

One approach to achieve this is to use a list generator:

def split(a, n):
    k, m = divmod(len(a), n)
    return (a[i*k+min(i, m):(i+1)*k+min(i+1, m)] for i in range(n))

Here's how it works:

• k is the number of items in each part, and m is the remainder from dividing the list length by n.
• The for loop iterates over the desired number of parts n.
• For each part, it calculates the starting and ending indices based on k, m, and the current iteration i.
• The slice a[start:end] extracts the elements for the current part.

Example:

>>> list(split(range(11), 3))
[[0, 1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6, 7], [8, 9, 10]]

This code splits a list of length 11 into 3 parts, resulting in parts with 4, 4, and 3 elements, respectively.

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