davidov0009 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a hash initialized from a DBM file, for a flash card program. I want to shuffle the hash before it is displayed. I am familiar with using the shuffle() function on arrays, but can't find anything for hashes. Any help appreciated. 
use strict;
use CGI;

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Re: Shuffling a hash
by Fletch (Bishop) on Jan 11, 2008 at 05:29 UTC

    Because hashes are by nature unordered (there is a natural order but it's not necessarily consistent and you shouldn't assume anything about it). Just shuffle the list of keys instead.

    The cake is a lie.
    The cake is a lie.
    The cake is a lie.

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Re: Shuffling a hash (example)
by tye (Sage) on Jan 11, 2008 at 05:31 UTC 
    for my $key (  shuffle( keys %hash )  ) {
    print "$key => $hash{$key}\n";
}

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    for example.

    - tye        

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[d/l]

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