Shuffling a list of objects

Question

I have a list of objects in Python and I want to shuffle them. I thought I could use the random.shuffle method, but this seems to fail when the list is of objects. Is there a method for shuffling object or another way around this?

import random

class a:
    foo = "bar"

a1 = a()
a2 = a()
b = [a1,a2]

print random.shuffle(b)

This will fail.

Answer 1

If you happen to be using numpy already (very popular for scientific and financial applications) you can save yourself an import.

import numpy as np    
np.random.shuffle(b)
print(b)

http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.random.shuffle.html

Answer 2

If you have multiple lists, you might want to define the permutation (the way you shuffle the list / rearrange the items in the list) first and then apply it to all lists:

import random

perm = list(range(len(list_one)))
random.shuffle(perm)
list_one = [list_one[index] for index in perm]
list_two = [list_two[index] for index in perm]

Numpy / Scipy

If your lists are numpy arrays, it is simpler:

import numpy as np

perm = np.random.permutation(len(list_one))
list_one = list_one[perm]
list_two = list_two[perm]

mpu

I've created the small utility package mpu which has the consistent_shuffle function:

import mpu

# Necessary if you want consistent results
import random
random.seed(8)

# Define example lists
list_one = [1,2,3]
list_two = ['a', 'b', 'c']

# Call the function
list_one, list_two = mpu.consistent_shuffle(list_one, list_two)

Note that mpu.consistent_shuffle takes an arbitrary number of arguments. So you can also shuffle three or more lists with it.

Answer 3

For one-liners, userandom.sample(list_to_be_shuffled, length_of_the_list) with an example:

import random
random.sample(list(range(10)), 10)

outputs: [2, 9, 7, 8, 3, 0, 4, 1, 6, 5]

Answer 4

def shuffle(_list):
    if not _list == []:
        import random
        list2 = []
        while _list != []:
            card = random.choice(_list)
            _list.remove(card)
            list2.append(card)
        while list2 != []:
            card1 = list2[0]
            list2.remove(card1)
            _list.append(card1)
        return _list

Answer 5

you could build a function that takes a list as a parameter and returns a shuffled version of the list:

from random import *

def listshuffler(inputlist):
    for i in range(len(inputlist)):
        swap = randint(0,len(inputlist)-1)
        temp = inputlist[swap]
        inputlist[swap] = inputlist[i]
        inputlist[i] = temp
    return inputlist

Answer 6

You can go for this:

>>> A = ['r','a','n','d','o','m']
>>> B = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
>>> import random
>>> random.sample(A+B, len(A+B))
[3, 'r', 4, 'n', 6, 5, 'm', 2, 1, 'a', 'o', 'd']

if you want to go back to two lists, you then split this long list into two.