Shuffling words in a sentence in javascript (coding horror - How to improve?)
- by Bill Zimmerman
Hi,
I'm trying to do something that is fairly simple, but my code looks terrible and I am certain there is a better way to do things in javascript. I am new to javascript, and am trying to improve my coding. This just feels very messy.
All I want to do is to randomly change the order some words on a web page. In python, the code would look something like this:
s = 'THis is a sentence'
shuffledSentence = random.shuffle(s.split(' ')).join(' ')
However, this is the monstrosity I've managed to produce in javascript
//need custom sorting function because javascript doesn't have shuffle?
function mySort(a,b) {
return a.sortValue - b.sortValue;
}
function scrambleWords() {
var content = $.trim($(this).contents().text());
splitContent = content.split(' ');
//need to create a temporary array of objects to make sorting easier
var tempArray = new Array(splitContent.length);
for (var i = 0; i < splitContent.length; i++) {
//create an object that can be assigned a random number for sorting
var tmpObj = new Object();
tmpObj.sortValue = Math.random();
tmpObj.string = splitContent[i];
tempArray[i] = tmpObj;
}
tempArray.sort(mySort);
//copy the strings back to the original array
for (i = 0; i < splitContent.length; i++) {
splitContent[i] = tempArray[i].string;
}
content = splitContent.join(' ');
//the result
$(this).text(content);
}
Can you help me to simplify things?
