extracts the first element and a *valuefunc* that extracts the second element:: >>> from operator import itemgetter >>> keys = [0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3] >>> values = 'abcdefghi' >>> iterable = zip(keys, values) >>> grouper = groupby_transform(iterable, itemgetter(0), itemgetter(1)) >>> [(k, ''.join(g)) for k, g in grouper] [(0, 'ab'), (1, 'cde'), (2, 'fgh'), (3, 'i')] Note that the order of items in the iterable is significant. Only adjacent items are grouped together, so if you don't want any duplicate groups, you should sort the iterable by the key function. Nc