Counter for items in lists in lists?

[Charlotte Henkle]

Ahhhh...thank you all!

Actually, I wanted to be able to count the items in the list to check
my thinking on a problem, and as it turns out, my thinking was
incorrect.  So I have a follow up question now ;)

Some background:

I was given a problem by a friend.  He is in a tennis group that has 6
members.  They play once a week for 10 weeks.  They were having
trouble generating a schedule that was random but fair (IE everyone
gets to play a base number of times , and the mod is evenly and
randomly distributed).

I decided that I wanted to abstract as much of the problem as possible
so that it would be reusable for other groups (IE to solve it for
games with N players, Y times over X weeks).  And then I decided I
wanted this to be my second program in python, so forgive my
clumsiness ;)

My first pass through was short and simple:  Figure out the total
number of games that will be played, and then use something like this:

gamePlayers=random.sample(templist, players_per_game)

to fill up all the game slots.  Neat, simple.

The problem I found with this solution was that it didn't give me a
weighted list for remainder.  The same person could get in all of the
"extra" games.

So instead I decided to fill games from my list of players by removal
until I had a number of players left less than a full game, and then
have a back-up list.  The back up list would act like a queue, but if
you were already in the game, it would take the next guy.  If you got
into a game from the back-up list, you were sent to the end of the
line.  My 2 lines grew to 50 plus ;)

Sadly, this isn't quite working either.  Now that I can print out the
players, I see that generally things work, but every once in a while,
I get an unexpected result.  For example, with 6 players, 10 weeks, 2
games per week, I would expect combinations of:

{'a': 13, 'c': 14, 'b': 14, 'e': 13, 'd': 13, 'f': 13}

(4 13s and 2 14s)

But sometimes I get:

{'a': 13, 'c': 14, 'b': 14, 'e': 14, 'd': 12, 'f': 13}

(2 13s, 3 14s and a 12)

That 12 breaks the planned even distribution. :(

I suspect the problem comes from the random pulling in the first part,
but I'm not sure.  I also feel that some sections (espcially the
print) don't have a "python-grace", so I would love some suggestions
to make them more...slithery?  :)

To make a long story longer, here's the code:

...#! /usr/bin/env python
...
...#A program to randomly fill a tennis schedule
...#
...#The original theory looked like this:
...#       gamePlayers=random.sample(templist, players_per_game)
...#       print gamePlayers
...#
...#But that didn't give a weighted list for extra games
...
...import random
...
...#Eventually these will get set dynamically
...number_of_weeks=10
...players=['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
...games_per_week=2
...players_per_game=4
...games=number_of_weeks*games_per_week
...
...#this will be used to pull off "extra game" players
...backupList=players[:]
...random.shuffle(backupList)
...
...#a templist so we can modify it.
...templist=players[:]
...
...#our finished product:
...finishedList=[]
...
...while len(finishedList)!=games:
...	if len(templist)>=players_per_game:
...		gamePlayers=[]
...		while len(gamePlayers)!=players_per_game:
...			randomNumber=random.randint(0, len(templist)-1)
...			potentialPlayer=templist.pop(randomNumber)
...			gamePlayers.append(potentialPlayer) 
...		finishedList.append(gamePlayers)
...	else: 
...		gamePlayers=templist
...		print "I am the leftover game players", gamePlayers
...		print "I am the list of backup players", backupList
...		count=0
...		while len(gamePlayers)!=players_per_game:
...			print "I am a potential player"
...			potentialPlayer=backupList[count]
...			print potentialPlayer	
...			print "checking to see if I'm in the game"
...			if potentialPlayer not in gamePlayers:
...				print "I do not think the player is in the game"
...				print "I am the back-up list", backupList
...				potentialPlayer=backupList.pop(count)
...				gamePlayers.append(potentialPlayer)
...				backupList.append(potentialPlayer)
...				print "I am the back-up list after reorder", backupList
...				print "I am the gamePlayers after test and insertion",
gamePlayers
...					
...			else: 
...				print "I think that player is in the game"
...				count+=1
...		finishedList.append(gamePlayers)
...		templist=players[:]	
...
...#count the list (thank you, Steve!
...http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=dI85d.47490%24wV.31831%40attbi_s54&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dcomp.lang.python%26ie%3DUTF-8%26hl%3Den%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch
...
...def count(item):
...     if not isinstance(item, list):
...             return {item:1}
...     counts = {}
...     for i in item:
...             for key, ct in count(i).items():
...                     counts[key] = counts.get(key, 0) + ct
...     return counts
...
...def printList(weeks, games, list):
...	x=0
...	while x!=weeks:
...		y=0
...		print "Week: ", x+1
...		while y<games:
...			print "Game ",y+1, " players are ", list[y]
...			y+=1
...		x+=1
...
...#printing out and counting the final list
...
...printList(number_of_weeks, games_per_week, finishedList)
...print finishedList.count("a")