RSS

Posts Tagged ‘Algorithms’

2 Dec 2008

Javascript array shuffle function

Author: Richard Francis | Filed under: Web Development

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!