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

you can either use shuffle or sample . both of which come from random module.

import random
def shuffle(arr1):
    n=len(arr1)
    b=random.sample(arr1,n)
    return b

OR

import random
def shuffle(arr1):
    random.shuffle(arr1)
    return arr1

Answer 2

#!/usr/bin/python3

import random

s=list(range(5))
random.shuffle(s) # << shuffle before print or assignment
print(s)

# print: [2, 4, 1, 3, 0]

Answer 3

In some cases when using numpy arrays, using random.shuffle created duplicate data in the array.

An alternative is to use numpy.random.shuffle. If you're working with numpy already, this is the preferred method over the generic random.shuffle.

numpy.random.shuffle

Example

>>> import numpy as np
>>> import random

Using random.shuffle:

>>> foo = np.array([[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]])
>>> foo

array([[1, 2, 3],
       [4, 5, 6],
       [7, 8, 9]])


>>> random.shuffle(foo)
>>> foo

array([[1, 2, 3],
       [1, 2, 3],
       [4, 5, 6]])

Using numpy.random.shuffle:

>>> foo = np.array([[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]])
>>> foo

array([[1, 2, 3],
       [4, 5, 6],
       [7, 8, 9]])


>>> np.random.shuffle(foo)
>>> foo

array([[1, 2, 3],
       [7, 8, 9],
       [4, 5, 6]])

Answer 4

One can define a function called shuffled (in the same sense of sort vs sorted)

def shuffled(x):
    import random
    y = x[:]
    random.shuffle(y)
    return y

x = shuffled([1, 2, 3, 4])
print x

Answer 5

random.shuffle should work. Here's an example, where the objects are lists:

from random import shuffle
x = [[i] for i in range(10)]
shuffle(x)

# print x  gives  [[9], [2], [7], [0], [4], [5], [3], [1], [8], [6]]
# of course your results will vary

Note that shuffle works in place, and returns None.

Answer 6

Make sure you are not naming your source file random.py, and that there is not a file in your working directory called random.pyc.. either could cause your program to try and import your local random.py file instead of pythons random module.