Thread: Shuffle elements in an array with duplicates

Hi, I'm new here and am trying to write a c program that shuffles elements in an array in a random order. I have shuffled them in random order but I now require to not have the same two elements side by side in the array. How can I do this?

Code:

for(i=1; i<10; i++){		
		
		j = rand()%(i+1);
		strcpy(t, s[j]);
		strcpy(s[j], s[i]);
		strcpy(s[i], t);
		
		sscanf(s[i-1],"%s, %*s, %*s, %*s", type_1);
		sscanf(s[i],"%s, %*s, %*s, %*s", type);
		
		printf("%s\n", type_1);
		printf("%s\n\n", type);
		
		if((strcmp(type_1, type)) == 0){
			
			printf("YESSSS");
			j = rand()%(i+1);
			sscanf(s[j],"%s, %*s, %*s, %*s", type_2);
			
			while(strcmp(type_2, type) == 0){
				printf("\n\nentered\n\n");
				j = rand()%(i+1);
				sscanf(s[j],"%s, %*s, %*s, %*s", type_2);
			}
			
			strcpy(t, s[j]);
			strcpy(s[j], s[i]);
			strcpy(s[i], t);
			
			
		}
		
		
		
		
	}

Your code is wacky. I can't really understand it. And your use of sscanf indicates some misunderstanding (certainly the %*s parts are not necessary, and the initial %s will read the comma as well if there's no space between it and the previous characters).

Still, the problem is interesting. If you don't have many duplicates in your data and you don't care too much about efficiency you could just scan for consecutive duplicates and if you find one, reshuffle and rescan, etc.

Obviously, you could also randomly reorder one of the consecutive duplicates, which would presumably be more efficient.

The problem is not solvable in general, e.g., 1, 1, 1, 2 doesn't have a permutation with no consecutive duplicates.