Question

I am trying to iteratively shuffle a list of 4 elements, then append the shuffled list to a growing list. The result will be a list that is some multiple of 4 elements long, with every four elements being some combination of my original list.

My code is

import random
list1 = ['X','Y','Z','Q']
list2 = []
for drop in range(0,72/4):
     random.shuffle(list1)
     list2.append(list1)

The problem that I seem to have is that list2 will be the same shuffled version of list1 over and over.

Example list2: [‘Q’,’X’,Z’,’Y’,’Q’,’X’,Z’,’Y’,’Q’,’X’,Z’,’Y’,…]

Answer 1

I think you wanted to write

list2.extend(list1)

Otherwise, you would add the same instance of the object list1 to list2 over and over again.