Question

Say I have two simple lists,

a = ['Spears', "Adele", "NDubz", "Nicole", "Cristina"]
b = [1,2,3,4,5]
len(a) == len(b)

What I would like to do is randomize a and b but maintain the order. So, something like:

a = ["Adele", 'Spears', "Nicole", "Cristina", "NDubz"]
b = [2,1,4,5,3]

I am aware that I can shuffle one list using:

import random
random.shuffle(a)

But this just randomizes a, whereas, I would like to randomize a, and maintain the “randomized order” in list b.

Would appreciate any guidance on how this can be achieved.

Answer 1

Use zip which has the nice feature to work in ‘both’ ways.

import random

a = ['Spears', "Adele", "NDubz", "Nicole", "Cristina"]
b = [1,2,3,4,5]
z = zip(a, b)
# => [('Spears', 1), ('Adele', 2), ('NDubz', 3), ('Nicole', 4), ('Cristina', 5)]
random.shuffle(z)
a, b = zip(*z)