Question

I am trying randomly generate a positive or negative number and rather then worry about the bigger range I am hoping to randomly generate either 1 or -1 to just multiply by my other random number.

I know this can be done with a longer rule of generating 0 or 1 and then checking return and using that to either multiply by 1 or -1.

Hoping someone knows of an easier way to just randomly set the sign on a number. Trying to keep my code as clean as possible.

Answer 1

I like to use arc4random() because it doesn’t require you to seed the random number generator. It also conveniently returns a uint_32_t, so you don’t have to worry about the result being between 0 and 1, etc. It’ll just give you a random integer.

int myRandom() {
  return (arc4random() % 2 ? 1 : -1);
}