[removed] randomly pair items from array without repeats

Question

I am trying to make a very basic \"secret santa\" generator as one of my first Javascript projects. I have searched for hours for a solution to this problem but so far noth

Answer 1

I would suggest a different approach. Shuffle, split, and zip, no mutation:

var splitAt = function(i, xs) {
  var a = xs.slice(0, i);
  var b = xs.slice(i, xs.length);
  return [a, b];
};

var shuffle = function(xs) {
  return xs.slice(0).sort(function() {
    return .5 - Math.random();
  });
};

var zip = function(xs) {
  return xs[0].map(function(_,i) {
    return xs.map(function(x) {
      return x[i];
    });
  });
}

// Obviously assumes even array
var result = zip(splitAt(names.length/2, shuffle(names)));
//^
// [
//   [ 'Nick', 'Kimmy' ],
//   [ 'Sean', 'Johnny' ],
//   [ 'Kyle', 'Brian' ],
//   [ 'Cotter', 'Pat' ],
//   [ 'Emily', 'Jeremy' ]
// ]