Nested lists or conditional logic?

[mike beck]

this is not all complex, but as a noob i'm having a hard time getting
my head around it.

i have a list of items. i need to print the items in batches of x,
with a summary line after each complete or partial batch, and a total
line at the end of the job.

if the list looks like ['line1','line2','line3'], and my ITEMSINBATCH
= 1, the output should look like this:

line1
---summary line---
line2
---summary line---
line3
---summary line---
---total line---

if ITEMSINBATCH = 2, the output should look like this:

line1
line2
---summary line---
line3
---summary line---
---total line---

i've done the following, which works, but it seems like there must be
a better/simpler/faster way to do this with nested loops. ideas?


# ---------------------Begin code---------------------
ITEMSINBATCH = 1;
ARBITRARYNUM = 51;

# create a list to work with
myList = ['1']*ARBITRARYNUM;

for i in range( len(myList) ):
    # avoid starting at 0
    count = i + 1;
    
    print "The item is:",myList[i],'\t',count;
    
    # ensure that the batch summary line is printed every ITEMSINBATCH
    # times but not if the number of items is evenly divisible by 
    # ITEMSINBATCH, in which case both the inner print and the outer 
    # print would execute and we'd get consecutive batch summary lines
    if ( (count) % ITEMSINBATCH ) is 0 and count != len(myList)::
        print "-----Add batch summary line-----";

# add a final batch line for those trailing items
print "------Add batch summary line------And BTW, i is", count;    

# and add the final summary line
print "------Add file summary------";

# ---------------------End code---------------------

TIA,
mike