I would also submit there's some value in the obvious readability of 

 z = runlength.encode(sequence)

vs

 z = [(k, len(list(g))) for k, g in itertools.groupby(sequence)]


but that's my personal opinion. Everyone is welcome to use my code, but I probably won't submit to pypi for a two function module,  it was just an idea :)

I do think it's worth adding to the docs, though, if only for future people / me googling "run length encoding python" and only finding stack overflow. 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:46 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:
On 6/10/2017 11:27 PM, Joshua Morton wrote:

Neal: As for why zip (at first I thought you meant the zip function, not the zip compression scheme) is included and rle is not, zip is (or was), I believe, used as part of python's packaging infrastructure, hopefully someone else can correct me if that's untrue.

 cpython can run from a zipped version of the stdlib.
In fact, sys.path contains 'C:\\Programs\\Python36\\python36.zip'

--
Terry Jan Reedy


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