Duncan Grisby wrote:
Sorry for the delay in replying. Yes, that's not far off. Most of the
time the lists contain strings, though. A better approximation might
be to read lines from a file and randomly replace them with Nones:
l = []
for line in open("bigfile.txt"):
x = random.randint(0,100)
if x < 4: l.append(None)
else: l.append(line)
So use '' or '\0' instead of None for null lines. Or replace None for
the sort.
And maybe once in a while you end up with something not dissimilar to:
l = []
for line in open("bigfile.txt"):
x = random.randint(0,100)
if x < 4: l.append(None)
elif x < 5: l.append([line,line])
else: l.append(line)
In that kind of case it doesn't really matter what happens to list
items in the sort order, but it's important it doesn't fail to sort
the ones that are strings.
Replace the sublists with a coded string, such as '\0'+line.
If sorting is time (and space) critical, you want a straight string sort
without key *or* cmp function.
tjr
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