Shuffling a list of objects in python

Question

I have a list of objects in python and I want to shuffle them. I thought I could use the random.shuffle method, but this seems to fail when the list is of objects. Is there a method for shuffling object or another way around this?

import random

class a:
    foo = "bar"

a1 = a()
a2 = a()
b = [a1,a2]

print random.shuffle(b)

This will fail

Answer 1

random.shuffle should work. Here's an example, where the objects are lists:

from random import shuffle
x = [[i] for i in range(10)]
shuffle(x)

# print x  gives  [[9], [2], [7], [0], [4], [5], [3], [1], [8], [6]]
# of course your results will vary

Note that shuffle works in place, and returns None.

Answer 2

>>> import random
>>> a = ['hi','world','cat','dog']
>>> random.shuffle(a,random.random)
>>> a
['hi', 'cat', 'dog', 'world']

It works fine for me. Make sure to set the random method.