Randomize a set of words

[Jennifer Sohl]

Hi. Not sure if this is the right place to post this. We are trying to create a table that has a ton of four letter words in it(minus the nasty ones ). Right now we have the list of words in an Excel spreadsheet in alphabetical order. We want to scramble these so when we use them to be assigned as order codes, they don't get assigned alphabetically. My question is, how do I do this? Can anyone supply me with some java code to get this done, or at least give me a couple of hints where to look?
Thanks in advance!!

[Michael Matola]

Take a look at Collections.shuffle() to see it can help you out.

[Carl Trusiak]

You can try something like this

import java.util.Random;
  
....
  
public String[] randomizeArray(String[] s)
{
    Vector v = new Vector(List.asList(s));
    Random random = new Random(System.currentTimeMillis());
    for(int i = 0; i < s.length ; i++ )
    {
        int pos = random.nextInt(v.size());
        s[i] = (String)v.elementAt(pos);
        v.remove(pos);
    }
    return s;
}
...

This will return the String[] in a completely random order.
[ April 08, 2002: Message edited by: Carl Trusiak ]

[Jennifer Sohl]

Thanks guys!!