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Split a list into n equal parts

Time:11-28

Given a sorted list, and a variable n, I want to break up the list into n parts. With n = 3, I expect three lists, with the last one taking on the overflow.

I expect: 0,1,2,3,4,5, 6,7,8,9,10,11, 12,13,14,15,16,17

If the number of items in the list is not divisible by n, then just put the overflow (mod n) in the last list.

This doesn't work:

static class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var input = new List<double>();
        for (int k = 0; k < 18;   k)
        {
            input.Add(k);
        }
        var result = input.Split(3);
        
        foreach (var resul in result)
        {
            foreach (var res in resul)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(res);
            }
        }
    }
}

static class LinqExtensions
{
    public static IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> Split<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int parts)
    {
        int i = 0;
        var splits = from item in list
                     group item by i   % parts into part
                     select part.AsEnumerable();
        return splits;
    }
}

CodePudding user response:

I think you would benefit from Linq's .Chunk() method.

If you first calculate how many parts will contain the equal item count, you can chunk list and yield return each chunk, before yield returning the remaining part of list (if list is not divisible by n).

As pointed out by Enigmativity, list should be materialized as an ICollection<T> to avoid possible multiple enumeration. The materialization can be obtained by trying to cast list to an ICollection<T>, and falling back to calling list.ToList() if that is unsuccessful.

A possible implementation of your extension method is hence:

public static IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> Split<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int parts)
{
    var collection = list is ICollection<T> c
        ? c
        : list.ToList();
    
    var itemCount = collection.Count;
    
    // return all items if source list is too short to split up
    if (itemCount < parts)
    {
        yield return collection;
        yield break;
    }
    
    var itemsInEachChunk = itemCount / parts;
    
    var chunks = itemCount % parts == 0
        ? parts
        : parts - 1;
    
    var itemsToChunk = chunks * itemsInEachChunk;
    
    foreach (var chunk in collection.Take(itemsToChunk).Chunk(itemsInEachChunk))
    {
        yield return chunk;
    }
    
    if (itemsToChunk < itemCount)
    {
        yield return collection.Skip(itemsToChunk);
    }
}

Example fiddle here.

CodePudding user response:

I see two issues with your code. First, the way you're outputting the results, it's impossible to tell the groupings of the values since you're just outputing each one on its own line.

This could be resolved buy using Console.Write for each value in a group, and then adding a Console.WriteLine() when the group is done. This way the values from each group are displayed on a separate line. We also might want to pad the values so they line up nicely by getting the length of the largest value and passing that to the PadRight method:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var numItems = 18;
    var splitBy = 3;

    var input = Enumerable.Range(0, numItems).ToList();
    var results = input.Split(splitBy);

    // Get the length of the largest value to use for padding smaller values, 
    // so all the columns will line up when we display the results
    var padValue = input.Max().ToString().Length   1;

    foreach (var group in results)
    {
        foreach (var item in group)
        {
            Console.Write($"{item}".PadRight(padValue));
        }

        Console.WriteLine();
    }

    Console.Write("\n\nDone. Press any key to exit...");
    Console.ReadKey();
} 

Now your results look pretty good, except we can see that the numbers are not grouped as we expect:

0  3  6  9  12 15
1  4  7  10 13 16
2  5  8  11 14 17

The reason for this is that we're grouping by the remainder of each item divided by the number of parts. So, the first group contains all numbers whose remainder after being divided by 3 is 0, the second is all items whose remainder is 1, etc.

To resolve this, we should instead divide the index of the item by the number of items in a row (the number of columns).

In other words, 18 items divided by 3 rows will result in 6 items per row. With integer division, all the indexes from 0 to 5 will have a remainder of 0 when divided by 6, all the indexes from 6 to 11 will have a remainder of 1 when divided by 6, and all the indexes from 12 to 17 will have a remainder of 2 when divided by 6.

However, we also have to be able to handle the overflow numbers. One way to do this is to check if the index is greater than or equal to rows * columns (i.e. it would end up on a new row instead of on the last row). If this is true, then we set it to the last row.

I'm not great at linq so there may be a better way to write this, but we can modify our extension method like so:

public static IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> Split<T>(
    this IEnumerable<T> list, int parts)
{
    int numItems = list.Count();
    int columns = numItems / parts;
    int overflow = numItems % parts;

    int index = 0;

    return from item in list
           group item by
               index   >= (parts * columns) ? parts - 1 : (index - 1) / columns
           into part
           select part.AsEnumerable();
}

And now our results look better:

// For 18 items split into 3
0  1  2  3  4  5
6  7  8  9  10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17

// For 25 items split into 7
0  1  2
3  4  5
6  7  8
9  10 11
12 13 14
15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24

CodePudding user response:

This should work.

static class Program
    {
    static void Main(string[] args)
        {
        var input = new List<String>();
        for (int k = 0; k < 18;   k)
            {
            input.Add(k.ToString());
            }
        var result = SplitList(input, 5);//I've used 5 but it can be any number
        
        foreach (var resul in result)
            {
            foreach (var res in result)
                {
                Console.WriteLine(res);
                }
            }
        }

    public static List<List<string>> SplitList (List<string> origList, int n)
        {//"n" is the number of parts you want to split your list into
        int splitLength = origList.Count / n;
        List<List<string>> listCollection = new List<List<string>>();

        for ( int i = 0; i < n; i   )
            {
            List<string> tempStrList = new List<string>();

            if ( i < n - 1 )
                {
                for ( int j = i * splitLength; j < (i   1) * splitLength; j   )
                    {
                    tempStrList.Add(origList[j]);
                    }
                }
            else
                {
                for ( int j = i * splitLength; j < origList.Count; j   )
                    {
                    tempStrList.Add(origList[j]);
                    }
                }

            listCollection.Add(tempStrList);
            }

        return listCollection;
        }
    }
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