Get a Random Array Item with JavaScript

By  on  

JavaScript Arrays are probably my favorite primitive in JavaScript. You can do all sorts of awesome things with arrays: get unique values, clone them, empty them, etc. What about getting a random value from an array?

To get a random item from an array, you can employ Math.random:

const arr = [
    "one",
    "two",
    "three",
    "four",
    "tell",
    "me",
    "that",
    "you",
    "love",
    "me",
    "more"
];
const random1 = arr[(Math.floor(Math.random() * (arr.length)))]
const random2 = arr[(Math.floor(Math.random() * (arr.length)))]
const random3 = arr[(Math.floor(Math.random() * (arr.length)))]
const random4 = arr[(Math.floor(Math.random() * (arr.length)))]

console.log(random1, random2, random3, random4)
// tell one more two

As for when you would need random values from an array is up to your individual application. It's nice to know, however, that you can easily get a random value. Should Array.prototype.random exist?

Recent Features

  • By
    Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer

    Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools TwitterGitter Plugin

    Everyone loves Twitter. Everyone loves MooTools. That's why everyone should love TwitterGitter, a MooTools plugin that retrieves a user's recent tweets and allows the user to format them however the user would like. TwitterGitter allows the user to choose the number of...

  • By
    Font Replacement Using Cufón

    We all know about the big font replacement methods. sIFR's big. Image font replacement has gained some steam. Not too many people know about a great project named Cufón though. Cufón uses a unique blend of a proprietary font generator tool...

Discussion

  1. It is worth noting if you’ve already got underscore or lodash included in your project, you can simply use _.sample. E.g.

    // will return one item randomly from the array
    _.sample(arr);
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!