pattern matching, tuples and multiplication in Python

Question

What is be best way to reduce this series of tuples

('x', 0.29, 'a')
('x', 0.04, 'a')
('x', 0.03, 'b')
('x', 0.02, 'b')
('x', 0.01, 'b')
('x', 0.20, 'c')
('x', 0.20, 'c')
('x', 0.10, 'c')

into:

('x', 0.29 * 0.04 , 'a')
('x', 0.03 * 0.02 * 0.01, 'b')
('x', 0.20 * 0.20 * 0.10, 'c')

EDIT: X is a constant, it is known in advance and can be safely ignored

And the data can be treated as pre-sorted on the third element as it appears above.

I am trying to do it at the moment using operator.mul, and a lot of pattern matching, and the odd lambda function... but I'm sure there must be an easier way!

Can I just say thank you for ALL of the answers. Each one of them was fantastic, and more than I could have hoped for. All I can do is give them all an upvote and say thanks!

Answer 1

Here's a functional programming approach:

from itertools import imap, groupby
from operator import itemgetter, mul

def combine(a):
    for (first, last), it in groupby(a, itemgetter(0, 2)):
        yield first, reduce(mul, imap(itemgetter(1), it), 1.0), last

Answer 2

Here's a more stateful approach. _{^{(I like @Sven's better.)}}

def combine(a)
    grouped = defaultdict(lambda: 1)

    for _, value, key in a:
        grouped[key] *= value

    for key, value in grouped.items():
        yield ('x', value, key)

This is less efficient if the data are already sorted, since it keeps more in memory than it needs to. Then again, that probably won't matter, because it's not stupidly inefficient either.