Best way to randomize a list of strings in Python

Question

I receive as input a list of strings and need to return a list with these same strings but in randomized order. I must allow for duplicates – same string may appear once or more in the input and must appear the same number of times in the output.

I see several “brute force” ways of doing that (using loops, god forbid), one of which I’m currently using. However, knowing Python there’s probably a cool one-liner do get the job done, right?

Asked By: Roee Adler

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Answer 1

Looks like this is the simplest way, if not the most truly random (this question more fully explains the limitations): http://docs.python.org/library/random.html#random.shuffle

Answered By: Tyler

Answer 2

>>> import random
>>> x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4]
>>> random.shuffle(x)
>>> x
[4, 4, 3, 1, 2, 3]
>>> random.shuffle(x)
>>> x
[3, 4, 2, 1, 3, 4]

Answered By: John Kugelman

Answer 3

You’ll have to read the strings into an array and then use a shuffling algorithm. I recommend Fisher-Yates shuffle

Answered By: Charles Ma

Answer 4

Given a string item, here is a one-liner:

''.join([str(w) for w in random.sample(item, len(item))])

Answered By: Yann VR

Answer 5

import random

b = []
a = int(input(print("How many items you want to shuffle? ")))
for i in range(0, a):
    n = input('Please enter a item: ')
    b.append(n)

random.shuffle(b)

print(b)

Answered By: inti pires

Answer 6

In python 3.8 you can use the walrus to help cram it into a couple of lines
First you have to create a list from the string and store it into a variable. Then you can use random to shuffle it. Then just join the list back into a string.

random.shuffle(x := list("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"))
x = "".join(x)

Answered By: Mikeologist

Best way to randomize a list of strings in Python

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