Random arraylist generation

Question

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.

Vulpes · 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

Duane · Answer

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.