Question

SO,
I am searching for a way to loop through a list of items in a for loop fashion, except I want the loop to iterate in a ‘random’ way. i.e. I dont want the loop to go 0,1,2,3,m+1…n, I want it to pick it in some random order and still run through the loop for all items.

Here is my current looping code:

for singleSelectedItem in listOfItems:
  item = singleSelectedItem.databaseitem
  logging.info(str(item))    

please let me know if this doesnt make sense 😉

Answer 1

If listOfItems can be shuffled, then

import random
random.shuffle(listOfItems)
for singleSelectedItem in listOfItems:
    blahblah

otherwise

import random
randomRange = range(len(listOfItems))
random.shuffle(randomRange)
for i in randomRange:
    singleSelectedItem = listOfItems[i]
    blahblah

Edit for Jochen Ritzel’s better approach in the comment.
The otherwise part can be

import random
for item in random.sample(listOfItems, len(listOfItems))
    blahblah