Python: split list into chunks of defined size and fill up rest

Question

I want to split my list into rows that have all the same number of columns, I'm looking for the best (most elegant/pythonic) way to achieve this:

>>> split.split_size([1,2,3], 5, 0)
[[1, 2, 3, 0, 0]]

>>> split.split_size([1,2,3,4,5], 5, 0)
[[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]]

>>> split.split_size([1,2,3,4,5,6], 5, 0)
[[1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [6, 0, 0, 0, 0]]

>>> split.split_size([1,2,3,4,5,6,7], 5, 0)
[[1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [6, 7, 0, 0, 0]]

That's what I came up with so far:

def split_size(l, size, fillup):
    """
    splits list into chunks of defined size, fills up last chunk with fillup if below size
    """
    # len(l) % size or size
    # does i.e. size=5: 3->2, 4->1, 5->0
    stack = l + [fillup] * (size - (len(l) % size or size))
    result = []
    while len(stack) > 0:
        result.append(stack[:5])
        del stack[:5]
    return result

I'm sure there must be some smarter solutions. Especially for the "inverse mod" part: len(l) % size or size there must be a more readable way to do this, no?

Answer 1

The itertools recipe called grouper does what you want:

def grouper(n, iterable, fillvalue=None):
    "grouper(3, 'ABCDEFG', 'x') --> ABC DEF Gxx"
    args = [iter(iterable)] * n
    return izip_longest(fillvalue=fillvalue, *args)