An Python implementation of Timsort

timsort.py

# based off of this code https://gist.github.com/nandajavarma/a3a6b62f34e74ec4c31674934327bbd3
# Brandon Skerritt
# https://skerritt.tech

def binary_search(the_array, item, start, end):
    if start == end:
        if the_array[start] > item:
            return start
        else:
            return start + 1
    if start > end:
        return start

    mid = round((start + end)/ 2)

    if the_array[mid] < item:
        return binary_search(the_array, item, mid + 1, end)

    elif the_array[mid] > item:
        return binary_search(the_array, item, start, mid - 1)

    else:
        return mid

"""
Insertion sort that timsort uses if the array size is small or if
the size of the "run" is small
"""
def insertion_sort(the_array):
    l = len(the_array)
    for index in range(1, l):
        value = the_array[index]
        pos = binary_search(the_array, value, 0, index - 1)
        the_array = the_array[:pos] + [value] + the_array[pos:index] + the_array[index+1:]
    return the_array

def merge(left, right):
    """Takes two sorted lists and returns a single sorted list by comparing the
    elements one at a time.
    [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
    """
    if not left:
        return right
    if not right:
        return left
    if left[0] < right[0]:
        return [left[0]] + merge(left[1:], right)
    return [right[0]] + merge(left, right[1:])

def timsort(the_array):
    runs, sorted_runs = [], []
    length = len(the_array)
    new_run = [the_array[0]]

    # for every i in the range of 1 to length of array
    for i in range(1, length):
        # if i is at the end of the list
        if i == length - 1:
            new_run.append(the_array[i])
            runs.append(new_run)
            break
        # if the i'th element of the array is less than the one before it
        if the_array[i] < the_array[i-1]:
            # if new_run is set to None (NULL)
            if not new_run:
                runs.append([the_array[i]])
                new_run.append(the_array[i])
            else:
                runs.append(new_run)
                new_run = []
        # else if its equal to or more than
        else:
            new_run.append(the_array[i])

    # for every item in runs, append it using insertion sort
    for item in runs:
        sorted_runs.append(insertion_sort(item))
    
    # for every run in sorted_runs, merge them
    sorted_array = []
    for run in sorted_runs:
        sorted_array = merge(sorted_array, run)

    print(sorted_array)

timsort([2, 3, 1, 5, 6, 7])

I was having some issues when sorting where integers were being duplicated, based off of the above code you wrote.

Looking things over, I noticed that the issue was potentially coming from insertion_sort and therefore went ahead and rewrote it. Here's the code snippet for anyone interested or having similar issues:

def insertion_sort(the_array):
    l = len(the_array)
    for index in range(1, l):
        value = the_array[index]
        while index>0 and the_array[index-1]>value:
            the_array[index] = the_array[index-1]
            index = index-1
            the_array[index] = value
    return the_array

Hi. I have made all the changes listed above, but when I run this on an array of random number of length 5000+ I get a recursion error.
It identifies line 47 as the problem.
Anybody got any ideas how to fix it?

It looks like the runs are not being allowed to grow to a large enough size so the merge element has way too much work to do.
For example, I had 2461 runs for an array of 5000 elements.

@ConorHogan, use this in your timsort method:: sys.setrecursionlimit(max(sys.getrecursionlimit(), len(the_array)))