Shuffle position of elements in a list

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Shuffling a list of objects in python

IF I have a list:

a = ["a", "b", "c", ..., "zzz"]

how can I randomly shuffle its elements in order to obtain a list:

b = ["c", "zh", ...]

without consuming a lot of the system's resources?

Exact duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/976882/shuffling-a-list-of-objects-in-python — Mike, Oct 17 '10 at 17:19

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 17 '10 at 17:17

9

import random
b = list(a)
random.shuffle(b)

answered Oct 17 '10 at 17:17

Matthew Flaschen

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 17 '10 at 17:17

5

random.shuffle() shuffles a sequence in-place.

answered Oct 17 '10 at 17:17

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 17 '10 at 17:18

2

Not sure how much resources it consumes, but shuffle in the random module does exactly like this.

import random
a = [1,2,3,4,5]
random.shuffle(a)

answered Oct 17 '10 at 17:18

jlv

It is returning a `None` value. – Santosh Kumar Jan 05 '13 at 06:11
It affects the original list. print(a) do this after `random.shuffle(a)` this line. – Rifat Rahman Dec 29 '21 at 09:32

3 Answers3