Best way to randomize a list of strings in Python

Question

I receive as input a list of strings and need to return a list with these same strings but in randomized order. I must allow for duplicates - same string may appear once or more in the input and must appear the same number of times in the output.

I see several "brute force" ways of doing that (using loops, god forbid), one of which I'm currently using. However, knowing Python there's probably a cool one-liner do get the job done, right?

Answer 1

Looks like this is the simplest way, if not the most truly random: http://docs.python.org/library/random.html#random.shuffle

Answer 2

>>> import random
>>> x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4]
>>> random.shuffle(x)
>>> x
[4, 4, 3, 1, 2, 3]
>>> random.shuffle(x)
>>> x
[3, 4, 2, 1, 3, 4]

Answer 3

You'll have to read the strings into an array and then use a shuffling algorithm. I recommend Fisher-Yates shuffle

Answer 4

Given a string str, here is a one-liner:

''.join([str(w) for w in random.sample(str, len(str))])