How can I organize two lists? string

Question

I have two long lists. One is names....John, Paul, Gorge, and Ringo ect x 50,000 each guy has a number. The numbers are after all the names in order. SO its like 45, 32, 22, 65. 32 is Pual. 45 is John ect. How can i format this so that each name goes with the number.

Thanks

string

Answer 1

Easiest way is to split each string into an array; most languages have a split() function that splits a string on a given delimiter.

String[] nameArray = nameList.split(",");
String[] numberArray = numberList.split(",");

Now you have two arrays, where numberArray[247] contains the number that goes with the name in nameArray[247] (for example).

So you could, for example, loop through them:

for (int i=0; i<nameArray.length; i++) {
   println(nameArray[i] + " : " + numberArray[i];
}

It may be different depending on what language you're using, of course. The above examples are java-ish; in ruby the equivalent could be something like

Hash[*nameArray.zip(numberArray).flatten].each {|key, value| puts "#{key} : #{value}" }

EDITED TO ADD: Here's an example using a space delimiter, and doing it in Python (disclaimer: I don't know Python particularly):

names = "John Paul George Ringo"
numbers = "11 12 13 14"
nameArray = names.split(" ")
numberArray = numbers.split(" ")
for i in range(len(nameArray)):
    print nameArray[i] + ": " + numberArray[i]

Answer 2

Assuming you want to turn it into a dictionary and you're starting with a python list (not a string used as a list):

base_list = ["John", "Paul", "Joe", 4, 5, 6]
names = []
numbers = []

for item in base_list:
    if isinstance(item, int): 
        # Checks if the item is an instance of int.
        # If it's a string, you can use the string's 'isdigit' function instead
        numbers.append(item)
    else: 
        names.append(item)

nameNumber = {}

for i in range(len(names)):
    # Iterate through a range of numbers from 0 to the size of names
    nameNumber[names[i]] = numbers[i]

This outputs {'Paul': 5, 'John': 4, 'Joe': 6}

If you just want to reorder your list so it goes name then number you can change the last few lines like so:

nameNumber = []

for i in range(len(names)):
    nameNumber.append(names[i])
    nameNumber.append(numbers[i])