How to shuffle array in JavaScript

May 03, 2020 No comments JavaScript Snippets Examples QA Shuffle Array

1. Introduction

In this short article, we are going to present the easiest way to shuffle an array in JavaScript.

2. Shuffle function

To shuffle an array in JavaScript we can use Math.random() a function that returns a pseudo-random number in range 0-1. First, we iterate over the collection and for every value, we add a special random identifier, then we sort the output by that generated id. The last step is to get original values from the temporary array that contains a value with id. 


const intList = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10];
const stringList = ["green", "yellow", "black", "white", "orange"];

const shuffle = (array) => array.map(a => [Math.random(), a])
        			.sort((a, b) => a[0] - b[0])
        			.map(a => a[1]);

console.log(shuffle(intList));
console.log(shuffle(stringList));

3. Conclusion

In this article, we show how to shuffle the array in JavaScript. We used Math.random() method to add a pseudo-random index to each element and then sort items by that additional identifier.
{{ message }}

{{ 'Comments are closed.' | trans }}