Consecutive counts:
You can use itertools.groupby:
s = "111000222334455555"
from itertools import groupby
groups = groupby(s)
result = [(label, sum(1 for _ in group)) for label, group in groups]
After which, result looks like:
[("1": 3), ("0", 3), ("2", 3), ("3", 2), ("4", 2), ("5", 5)]
And you could format with something like:
", ".join("{}x{}".format(label, count) for label, count in result)
# "1x3, 0x3, 2x3, 3x2, 4x2, 5x5"
Total counts:
Someone in the comments is concerned that you want a total count of numbers so "11100111" -> {"1":6, "0":2}. In that case you want to use a collections.Counter:
from collections import Counter
s = "11100111"
result = Counter(s)
# {"1":6, "0":2}
Your method:
As many have pointed out, your method fails because you’re looping through range(len(s)) but addressing s[i+1]. This leads to an off-by-one error when i is pointing at the last index of s, so i+1 raises an IndexError. One way to fix this would be to loop through range(len(s)-1), but it’s more pythonic to generate something to iterate over.
For string that’s not absolutely huge, zip(s, s[1:]) isn’t a a performance issue, so you could do:
counts = []
count = 1
for a, b in zip(s, s[1:]):
if a==b:
count += 1
else:
counts.append((a, count))
count = 1
The only problem being that you’ll have to special-case the last character if it’s unique. That can be fixed with itertools.zip_longest
import itertools
counts = []
count = 1
for a, b in itertools.zip_longest(s, s[1:], fillvalue=None):
if a==b:
count += 1
else:
counts.append((a, count))
count = 1
If you do have a truly huge string and can’t stand to hold two of them in memory at a time, you can use the itertools recipe pairwise.
def pairwise(iterable):
"""iterates pairwise without holding an extra copy of iterable in memory"""
a, b = itertools.tee(iterable)
next(b, None)
return itertools.zip_longest(a, b, fillvalue=None)
counts = []
count = 1
for a, b in pairwise(s):
...