Randomize dictionary sorting

Question

I have been thinking this through but I did not come to any conclusion (not that great with Python yet).

My dictionary looks like this:

{1: [dog, animal], 2: [square, shape], 3: [red, color]}

I am printing out the values but the dictionary is sorted by numbers, which is fine but I want to randomize it so I print out something like this:

3
red
color
1
dog
animal
2
square
shape

I know that list would be more ideal for this situation but this data is from existing structure that I cannot change. Maybe re-numbering the keys would do the trick?

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:26

6

Dictionaries are already listed in arbitrary order, they do not have a fixed order. See Why is the order in dictionaries and sets arbitrary? Any sense of order is a coincidence and depends on the insertion and deletion history of the dictionary.

That said, it's easy enough to further ensure a shuffled list with random.shuffle():

import random

items = yourdict.items()
random.shuffle(items)

for key, value in items:
    print key
    print '\n'.join(value)

edited May 23 '17 at 10:26

Community

1
1

answered May 26 '14 at 20:43

Martijn Pieters

1,048,767
296
4,058
3,343

Nice! You can use os.linesep for platform-agnostic line separator :) +1 for the link – Reut Sharabani May 26 '14 at 20:45
1

@ReutSharabani: when writing to a text file, newlines are already translated for you. When using `print` you don't need to use platform-specific line separators either. – Martijn Pieters May 26 '14 at 20:46
well ... to be fair, _arbitrary_ is not the same as _random_. – mgilson May 26 '14 at 20:51

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered May 26 '14 at 20:43

4

You can randomize the keys:

import random
....
keys = dictionary.keys()
random.shuffle(keys)
for key in keys:
    print key, dictionary[key]

answered May 26 '14 at 20:43

Reut Sharabani

30,449
6
70
88

I would do `keys = list(dictionary)` to make it forward compatible. – mgilson May 26 '14 at 20:50
can you elaborate? python.org uses `keys()` in the note about `items()` and nothing is said in `keys()` itself... – Reut Sharabani May 26 '14 at 20:57
in python3.x, `keys` returns an object which is a lot more `set`-like. IIRC, it doesn't support the indexing which is required by `random.shuffle`. `list(d)` gives the same thing that `d.keys()` gave in python2.x. – mgilson May 26 '14 at 23:07

Randomize dictionary sorting

2 Answers2