Hi Monks,

I'm running a number of operations on a set of data, but I want the list of data to be in a random order each time i process it.

$stuff = [ 'cat', 'dog', 'pig', 'cow' ];

and running through the list would give random combinations... i.e. 
cat dog pig cow
cow cat pig dog
dog cow cat pig
...
...

[download]
What I want to ask advice for is what is the fastest/most efficient way to do this? Is there some neat equivalent of sort that equates to unsort. I was thinking of having either a hash or array and picking a value from the list then removing that selection and repeating until the list was empty each iteration, but that seems a little unwheeldly. I don't want any of the values repeated from the list i.e. dog dog cat pig, so just doing a rand on the size of my list is not what I'm after to select the elements.

Regards Paul.

In reply to unsorted list by thekestrel

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