[Numpy-discussion] Need faster equivalent to digitize

[Peter Shinners]

I am using digitize to create a list of indices. This is giving me 
exactly what I want, but it's terribly slow. Digitize is obviously not 
the tool I want for this case, but what numpy alternative do I have?

I have an array like np.array((4, 3, 3)). I need to create an index 
array with each index repeated by the its value: np.array((0, 0, 0, 0, 
1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2)).

 >>> a = np.array((4, 3, 3))
 >>> b = np.arange(np.sum(a))
 >>> c = np.digitize(b, a)
 >>> print c
[0 0 0 0 1 1 1 2 2 2]

On an array where a.size==65536 and sum(a)==65536 this is taking over 6 
seconds to compute. As a comparison, using a Python list solution runs 
in 0.08 seconds. That is plenty fast, but I would guess there is a 
faster Numpy solution that does not require a dynamically growing 
container of PyObjects ?

 >>> a = np.array((4, 3, 3))
 >>> c = []
 >>> for i, v in enumerate(a):
...     c.extend([i] * v)