Identifying the start of good data in a list

[castironpi]

On Aug 27, 3:42 pm, George Sakkis <george.sak... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Below are two more versions that pass all the doctests: the first
> works only for lists and modifies them in place and the second works
> for arbitrary iterables:
>
> def clean_inplace(seq, good_ones=4):
>     start = 0
>     n = len(seq)
>     while start < n:
>         try: end = seq.index(0, start)
>         except ValueError: end = n
>         if end-start >= good_ones:
>             break
>         start = end+1
>     del seq[:start]
>
> def clean_iter(iterable, good_ones=4):
>     from itertools import chain, islice, takewhile, dropwhile
>     iterator = iter(iterable)
>     is_zero = float(0).__eq__
>     while True:
>         # consume all zeros up to the next non-zero
>         iterator = dropwhile(is_zero, iterator)
>         # take up to `good_ones` non-zeros
>         good = list(islice(takewhile(bool,iterator), good_ones))
>         if not good: # iterator exhausted
>             return iterator
>         if len(good) == good_ones:
>             # found `good_ones` consecutive non-zeros;
>             # chain them to the rest items and return them
>             return chain(good, iterator)
>
> HTH,
> George

You gave me an idea-- maybe an arbitrary 'lookahead' iterable could be
useful.  I haven't seen them that much on the newsgroup, but more than
once.  IOW a buffered consumer.  Something that you could check a
fixed number of next elements of.  You might implement it as a
iterator with a __getitem__ method.

Example, unproduced:

>>> import itertools
>>> a= itertools.count( )
>>> a.next()
0
>>> a.next()
1
>>> a[ 3 ]
5
>>> a.next()
2
>>> a[ 3 ]
6

Does this make sense at all?