Python: group a list into sublists by a equality of projected value

The itertools module in the standard-library contains a groupby() function that should do what you want.

Note that the input to groupby() should be sorted by the group key to yield each group only once, but it's easy to use the same key function for sorting. So if your key function (projection) is looking at whether a number is even, it would look like this:

from itertools import groupby
x = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

def projection(val):
    return val % 3

x_sorted = sorted(x, key=projection)
x_grouped = [list(it) for k, it in groupby(x_sorted, projection)]    
print(x_grouped)

[[0, 3, 6], [1, 4, 7], [2, 5]]

Note that while this version only uses standard Python features, if you are dealing with more than maybe 100.000 values, you should look into pandas (see @ayhan's answer)

A pandas version would be like this:

import pandas as pd
x = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
pd.Series(x).groupby(lambda t: t%3).groups
Out[13]: {0: [0, 3, 6], 1: [1, 4, 7], 2: [2, 5]}

Or

pd.Series(x).groupby(lambda t: t%3).groups.values()
Out[32]: dict_values([[0, 3, 6], [1, 4, 7], [2, 5]])

No need to sort.

from collections import defaultdict

def groupby(iterable, projection):
    result = defaultdict(list)
    for item in iterable:
        result[projection(item)].append(item)
    return result

x = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
groups = groupby(x, projection=lambda e: e % 3)
print groups
print groups[0]

Output:

defaultdict(<type 'list'>, {0: [0, 3, 6], 1: [1, 4, 7], 2: [2, 5]})
[0, 3, 6]