Random arraylist generation

Duane

I sincerely doubt if this is a unique problem, but I have been unable to find or come up with a workable solution. Briefly, I have two arraylists, each containing characters. One has vowels, the other consonants. I need to get three random vowels and seven random consonants to create a new combined arraylist. Then I need to randomly sort that arraylist. No duplicate items are allowed. This final item seems to be my problem, but if there is a more succinct method of performing this operation I'm ready to hear about it.

Hopefully,
colossus1958

P.S. I hope I have this in the right forum, if not please let me know.

2 Replies

Know the answer? Post it — somebody with the same question will find it here.

Vulpes15y ago
Accepted answer
Try the following:

Imports System
Imports System.Collections

Module Program

Private rand As New Random()

Sub Main()

Dim consonants As New ArrayList()
For Each c As Char In "bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz"
consonants.Add(c)
Next

Dim vowels As New ArrayList()
For Each c As Char In "aeiou"
vowels.Add(c)
Next

Dim combined As New ArrayList()
Dim choice As Integer

For i As Integer = 1 To 7
While True
choice = rand.Next(0, 21)
If Not combined.Contains(consonants(choice)) Then
combined.Add(consonants(choice))
Exit While
End If
End While
Next

For i As Integer = 1 To 3
While True
choice = rand.Next(0, 5)
If Not combined.Contains(vowels(choice)) Then
combined.Add(vowels(choice))
Exit While
End If
End While
Next

' print unsorted arraylist to console
Console.Write("Unsorted : ")
For i As Integer = 0 To 9
Console.Write(combined(i))
Next

Console.WriteLine()
Dim randSortCombined As New ArrayList()

For i As Integer = 1 To 10
While True
choice = rand.Next(0, 10)
If Not randSortCombined.Contains(combined(choice)) Then
randSortcombined.Add(combined(choice))
Exit While
End If
End While
Next

' print randomly sorted arraylist to console
Console.Write("Sorted : ")
For i As Integer = 0 To 9
Console.Write(randSortcombined(i))
Next

Console.WriteLine()
Console.ReadKey()

End Sub

End Module
Duane15y ago
Thanks. That is a much better solution than the gibberish I wrote. Also, it works properly. I got my program working as it was, but I'm going to use this instead. Again, thanks.