Gilles Ganault <nos...@nospam.com> writes: > On Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:17:44 +0100, Gilles Ganault <nos...@nospam.com> > wrote: >>To avoid users from creating login names that start with digits in >>order to be listed at the top, I'd like to sort the list differently >>every minute so that it'll start with the next letter, eg. display the >>list from A...Zdigits the first time, then B...ZAdigits, etc. > > Thanks everyone for the great feedback. I ended up using > - a list instead of a dictionary to hold the list of names > - use the random library to pick a character from which to start > listing names (simpler than saving the next letter into a file, and > starting from this the next time the loop is gone through) > > For those interested, here's some working code: > > ========== > import random > > connected = > ["_test","-test","0test","1test","Aa","Aab","Bb","Bbbbb","Cc","Ccaaaaaa"] > connected.sort() > > #Fill list with non-duplicate first letter of all items > characters=[] > for name in connected: > char = name[0] > #if this character not in list, add to array > if not char in characters: > characters.append(char)
characters = list(set(name[0] for name in connected)) > #Pick a random character from which to start iterating > index = random.randint(0,len(characters)-1) > startch = characters[index] startch = random.choice(characters) > print "Will start from %s" % startch > > #Go through list starting with items that start with 'starch', and > rotate from beginning > result = [name for name in connected if name[0] >= startch] + [name > for name in connected if name[0] < startch] It would make sense to keep track of the indices where the first word starting with a certain letter starts in the earlier part of the code and to use it now to 'rotate' the list. > print result > ========== > > Thanks again. -- Arnaud -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
