How to assign each item in a list an equal amount of items from another list in python [duplicate]

Question

Let's say I have a list of people

['foo','bar','baz']

and a list of items

['hat','bag','ball','bat','shoe','stick','pie','phone']

and I want to randomly assign each person an equal amount of items, like so

{
'foo':['hat','bat','stick'],
'bar':['bag','shoe','phone'],
'baz':['ball','pie']
}

I think itertools is the job for this, but I couldn't seem to find the right function as most itertools functions seem to just work on one object.

EDIT: Order does not matter. I just want to randomly assign each person an equal amount of items.

Answer 1

Another solution, using itertools.cycle:

import random
from itertools import cycle

persons = ["foo", "bar", "baz"]
items = ["hat", "bag", "ball", "bat", "shoe", "stick", "pie", "phone"]

random.shuffle(items)

out = {}
for p, i in zip(cycle(persons), items):
    out.setdefault(p, []).append(i)

print(out)

Prints (for example):

{
    "foo": ["phone", "pie", "bat"],
    "bar": ["bag", "stick", "hat"],
    "baz": ["shoe", "ball"],
}

---

If there could be fewer items than persons and each person should have key in output dictionary you can use:

import random
from itertools import cycle

persons = ["foo", "bar", "baz"]
items = ["hat", "bag", "ball", "bat", "shoe", "stick", "pie", "phone"]

random.shuffle(items)
random.shuffle(persons)  # to randomize who gets fewest items

out = {p: [] for p in persons}
for lst, i in zip(cycle(out.values()), items):
    lst.append(i)

print(out)