What's the Best Way to Shuffle an NSMutableArray?

Question

If you have an NSMutableArray, how do you shuffle the elements randomly?

(I have my own answer for this, which is posted below, but I\'m new to Cocoa an

Answer 1

Since I can't yet comment, I thought I'd contribute a full response. I modified Kristopher Johnson's implementation for my project in a number of ways (really trying to make it as concise as possible), one of them being arc4random_uniform() because it avoids modulo bias.

// NSMutableArray+Shuffling.h
#import 

/** This category enhances NSMutableArray by providing methods to randomly
 * shuffle the elements using the Fisher-Yates algorithm.
 */
@interface NSMutableArray (Shuffling)
- (void)shuffle;
@end

// NSMutableArray+Shuffling.m
#import "NSMutableArray+Shuffling.h"

@implementation NSMutableArray (Shuffling)

- (void)shuffle
{
    NSUInteger count = [self count];
    for (uint i = 0; i < count - 1; ++i)
    {
        // Select a random element between i and end of array to swap with.
        int nElements = count - i;
        int n = arc4random_uniform(nElements) + i;
        [self exchangeObjectAtIndex:i withObjectAtIndex:n];
    }
}

@end