Is there a built-in python function to count bit flip in a binary string? The question I am trying to solve is given a binary string of arbitrary length, how can I return the number of bit flips of the string. For example, the bit flip number of '01101' is 3, and '1110011' is 2, etc.

The way I can come up with to solve this problem is to use a for loop and a counter. However, that seems too lengthy. Is there a way I can do that faster? Or is there a built-in function in python that allows me to do that directly? Thanks for the help!

CodePudding user response：

Don't know about a built in function, but here's a one-liner:

bit_flip_count = len([x for x in range(1, len(x0)) if x0[x] != x0[x-1]])

CodePudding user response：

Given a sequence of values, you can find the number of times that the value changes by grouping contiguous values and then counting the groups. There will be one more group than the number of changes (since the elements before the first change are also in a group). (Of course, for an empty sequence, this gives you a result of -1; you may want to handle this case separately.)

Grouping in Python is built-in, via the standard library itertools.groupby. This tool only considers contiguous groups, which is often a drawback (if you want to make a histogram, for example, you have to sort the data first) but in our case is exactly what we want. The overall interface of this tool is a bit complex, but in our case we can use it simply:

from itertools import groupby

def changes_in(sequence):
    return len(list(groupby(sequence))) - 1