assign names to elements of unknown size list in python

Question

consider I have input list contains elements 19 14 36 how to assign a name to each element say A for 1st element, B for 2nd and C for 3rd and the output is sorted list ( 14, 19, 36) but the printed list on console I want it to be (B, A,C)

what is the function do assignment operation in python?

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this for an arbitrary length list would probably be something like:

from operator import itemgetter
from string import ascii_uppercase

data = [19, 14, 36]

labelled = zip(data, ascii_uppercase) # [(19, 'A'), (14, 'B'), (36, 'C')]

sorted_data = sorted(labelled, 
                     key=itemgetter(0)) # [(14, 'B'), (19, 'A'), (36, 'C')]

labels = [pair[1] for pair in sorted_data] # ['B', 'A', 'C']

Answer 2

You can do it with zip:

>>> a = [19, 14, 36]
>>> b = ['A', 'B', 'C']

>>> print [b for (a,b) in sorted(zip(a,b), key=lambda x: x[0])]
['B', 'A', 'C']

You can experiment here

Answer 3

You can use zip and itemgetter to do the trick:

import operator
number_arr = [19, 14, 32]
letter_arr = ['A', 'B', 'C']

zipped = zip(number_arr, letter_arr)

sorted_by_number = sorted(zipped, key=operator.itemgetter(0))

print list(map(operator.itemgetter(1), sorted_by_number))

Refer to python docs on zip, map and itemgetter for details