Best way to randomize a list of strings in Python

python string random
Roee Adler picture Roee Adler · Jun 20, 2009 · Viewed 94.2k times · Source

I receive as input a list of strings and need to return a list with these same strings but in randomized order. I must allow for duplicates - same string may appear once or more in the input and must appear the same number of times in the output.

I see several "brute force" ways of doing that (using loops, god forbid), one of which I'm currently using. However, knowing Python there's probably a cool one-liner do get the job done, right?

Answer

John Kugelman picture John Kugelman · Jun 20, 2009 
>>> import random
>>> x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4]
>>> random.shuffle(x)
>>> x
[4, 4, 3, 1, 2, 3]
>>> random.shuffle(x)
>>> x
[3, 4, 2, 1, 3, 4]

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