I have a list that starts with zeros, has sporadic data, and then has good data. I define the point at which the data turns good to be the first index with a non-zero entry that is followed by at least 4 consecutive non-zero data items (i.e. a week's worth of non-zero data). For example, if my list is [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], I would define the point at which data turns good to be 4 (1 followed by 2, 3, 4, 5).
I have a simple algorithm to identify this changepoint, but it looks crude: is there a cleaner, more elegant way to do this? flag = True i=-1 j=0 while flag and i < len(retHist)-1: i += 1 if retHist[i] == 0: j = 0 else: j += 1 if j == 5: flag = False del retHist[:i-4] Thanks in advance for your help Thomas Philips -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list