What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]
Friday April 30, 2004
Randomizing a list Needing to to randomize the contents of a Perl array, I was just about to write the code myself but decided to snoop around CPAN first. Lo and behold, I found that there was something in the Perl distribution already that did what I need.
As of Perl 5.8, there's a module in the standard library with a boat load of things you need to with a list from time to time. It was nice to stumble upon the List::Util class; it's got a method called shuffle that does the trick. Here's an example of getting a randomized list using shuffle:
use List::Util 'shuffle';
my @list = ('a'..'z');
my @shuffled = shuffle(@list);
# @shuffled is randomized, @list is unchanged
print "@shuffled\n";
There are more useful methods like min, max and sum that should make dealing with
aggregations of values much easier.
( Apr 30 2004, 11:45:45 PM PDT )
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