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

The shuffling process is "with replacement", so the occurrence of each item may change! At least when when items in your list is also list.

E.g.,

ml = [[0], [1]] * 10

After,

random.shuffle(ml)

The number of [0] may be 9 or 8, but not exactly 10.

Answer 2

>>> import random
>>> a = ['hi','world','cat','dog']
>>> random.shuffle(a,random.random)
>>> a
['hi', 'cat', 'dog', 'world']

It works fine for me. Make sure to set the random method.

Answer 3

'print func(foo)' will print the return value of 'func' when called with 'foo'. 'shuffle' however has None as its return type, as the list will be modified in place, hence it prints nothing. Workaround:

# shuffle the list in place 
random.shuffle(b)

# print it
print(b)

If you're more into functional programming style you might want to make the following wrapper function:

def myshuffle(ls):
    random.shuffle(ls)
    return ls

Answer 4

import random

class a:
    foo = "bar"

a1 = a()
a2 = a()
a3 = a()
a4 = a()
b = [a1,a2,a3,a4]

random.shuffle(b)
print(b)

shuffle is in place, so do not print result, which is None, but the list.

Answer 5

""" to shuffle random, set random= True """

def shuffle(x,random=False):
     shuffled = []
     ma = x
     if random == True:
         rando = [ma[i] for i in np.random.randint(0,len(ma),len(ma))]
         return rando
     if random == False:
          for i in range(len(ma)):
          ave = len(ma)//3
          if i < ave:
             shuffled.append(ma[i+ave])
          else:
             shuffled.append(ma[i-ave])    
     return shuffled