Better way to shuffle two related lists

Question

Is there better ways to randomly shuffle two related lists without breaking their correspondence in the other list? I\'ve found related questions in numpy.array

Answer 1

If you have to do this often, you could consider adding one level of indirection by shuffling a list of indexes.

Python 2.6.6 (r266:84297, Aug 24 2010, 18:13:38) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on
win32
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>>> import random
>>> a = [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6], [7, 8], [9, 10]]
>>> b = [2, 4, 6, 8, 10]
>>> indexes = range(len(a))
>>> indexes
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> random.shuffle(indexes)
>>> indexes
[4, 1, 2, 0, 3]
>>> for index in indexes:
...     print a[index], b[index]
...
[9, 10] 10
[3, 4] 4
[5, 6] 6
[1, 2] 2
[7, 8] 8