itertools.groupby almost does what you want, except it requires the items to be sorted to ensure that you get a single contiguous range, so you need to sort by your key first (otherwise you'll get multiple interleaved groups for each type). eg.
def is_good(f): return f[2].lower() in IMAGE_TYPESfiles = [ ('file1.jpg', 33L, '.jpg'), ('file2.avi', 999L, '.avi'), ('file3.gif', 123L, '.gif')]for key, group in itertools.groupby(sorted(files, key=is_good), key=is_good): print key, list(group)gives:
False [('file2.avi', 999L, '.avi')]True [('file1.jpg', 33L, '.jpg'), ('file3.gif', 123L, '.gif')]Similar to the other solutions, the key func can be defined to divide into any number of groups you want.