I was recently trying to solve a problem for a colleague of mine. He wanted to simply shuffle an array. I hunted around for hours trying to find a way to do this. Eventually I found an algorithm and built this into an easy to use function.

You simply parse the array that you wish to shuffle, and the function will return a new (shuffled) array. The code is as follows:

function shuffle(theArray){
    for (var j, x, i = theArray.length; i; j = parseInt(Math.random() * i), x = theArray[ i], theArray[i] = theArray[j], theArray[j] = x);
    return theArray;
};

I hope you find this useful!

Tags: Algorithms, Javascript

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.