uniform distribution of a set of characters

Question

There is a set of characters that needs to be uniformly distributed in an array. For example,

a - 1

b - 2

c - 3

d - 4

In this case there

Answer 1

You could use something similar to the bresenham algorithm to track the error between the ideal spacing and the last spacing for each component:

vals = ['a','b','c','d']
cts  = [1,2,3,4]

sz = sum(cts)
spacing = [float(sz)/(ct+1) for ct in cts]
err = [s for s in spacing]
a=[]
for i in range(sz):
    err = [e-1 for e in err]
    m = min(err)
    i = err.index(m)
    a.append(vals[i])
    err[i]+=spacing[i]
print a

yeilds: ['d', 'c', 'b', 'd', 'a', 'c', 'd', 'b', 'c', 'd']