Most pythonic way of rotating a circular list to a canonical point

[Lukas Barth]

Hi!

I have a list of numbers that I treat as "circular", i.e. [1,2,3] and [2,3,1] should be the same. Now I want to rotate these to a well defined status, so that I can can compare them.

If all elements are unique, the solution is easy: find the minimum element, find its index, then use mylist[:index] + mylist[index:], i.e. the minimum element will always be at the beginning.

But say I have [0,1,0,2,0,3]. I can in fact guarantee that no *pair* will appear twice in that list, i.e. I could search for the minimum, if that is unique go on as above, otherwise find *all* positions of the minimum, see which is followed by the smallest element, and then rotate that position to the front.

Now that seems an awful lot of code for a (seemingly?) simple problem. Is there a nice, pythonic way to do this?

Thanks for enlightening me!

Lukas