How to Shuffle a List in Python

Shuffle a List with Random

random is a Python module that implements pseudo-random number generators. random.shuffle can shuffle a list in-place.

random.shuffle(x[, random]): Shuffle the sequence x in place.

The optional argument random is a 0-argument function returning 
a random float in [0.0, 1.0); by default, this is the function random().

Let’s run a simple usage example. From the output we can see the list is modified after shuffling, this is called in-place strategy:

import random
numbers = [71, 1, 21, 22, 35, 41, 49, 56, 63, 70]
print ("Original: ", numbers)
> ('Original: ', [71, 1, 21, 22, 35, 41, 49, 56, 63, 70])

random.shuffle(numbers) #shuffle method
print ("Shuffled: ", numbers)
> ('Shuffled: ', [49, 22, 63, 70, 56, 21, 1, 71, 41, 35])

We can also use random.shuffle() to shuffle a list with strings.

a = ["hello", "coder", "cat"]
random.shuffle(a)
print(a)
> ['coder', 'hello', 'cat']

Shuffle a list with not-in-place

If we don’t want to modify the original list, we can use another function called random.sample, it will return a new list and keep the original list un-touched.

This is called not-in-place strategy:

import random
numbers = [71, 1, 21, 22, 35, 41, 49, 56, 63, 70]
new_numbers = random.sample(numbers, len(numbers))
print ("new_numbers: ", new_numbers)
> ('new_numbers: ', [56, 35, 49, 41, 71, 70, 22, 63, 1, 21])

Implement it by yourself

Challenge:

Implement a Python function which will shuffle a list, return a new list.

If this is an interview question, can you finish it bug-free in 15 minutes?

Have a try now, :)

A simple algorithm for shuffling array or list is Fisher-Yates:

from copy import deepcopy
from random import randint

def shuffle(lst):
    tmp = deepcopy(lst)
    m = len(tmp)
    while(m):
        m -= 1
        i = randint(0, m)
        tmp[m], tmp[i] = tmp[i], tmp[m]
    return tmp

foo = [1,2,3]
shuffle(foo) # [2,3,1] , foo = [1,2,3]

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