Yelotofu

Yelotofu ~ “In building standards compliant sites we are creating a better Web for the future.”

jQuery: Shuffle Plugin

I recently came across a really compact array shuffling function on JSFromHell.com, which I thought would make a nifty jQuery plugin.

This jQuery shuffle plugin could be applied to any HTML element or Array object.

 
(function($){
  $.fn.shuffle = function() {
    return this.each(function(){
      var items = $(this).children();
      return (items.length)
        ? $(this).html($.shuffle(items))
        : this;
    });
  }
 
  $.shuffle = function(arr) {
    for(
      var j, x, i = arr.length; i;
      j = parseInt(Math.random() * i),
      x = arr[--i], arr[i] = arr[j], arr[j] = x
    );
    return arr;
  }
})(jQuery);
 

Due to line wrapping issues in this post I inserted a few hard carriage returns in the above snippet (sorry).

Example 1: shuffle an unordered list

 
$('ul').shuffle();
 

Example 2: shuffle an array

 
var arr = [1,2,3,4,5,6];
arr = $.shuffle(arr);
 

There is a demo here. And for those interested I encourage you to download the plugin for closer inspection.

jQuery: outerHTML

The outerHTML property (IE only) could sometimes be very handy, especially if you're trying to replace an element entirely. Brandon Aaron has very kindly given us a outerHTML plugin that does half the job as it doesn't support replacements. The following code snippet fills in the blanks:

jQuery.fn.outerHTML = function(s) {
return (s)
? this.before(s).remove()
: jQuery("<p>").append(this.eq(0).clone()).html();
}

To get the outerHTML value of an element do this...

$('#myTag').outerHTML();

To replace #myTag entirely do this...

$('#myTag').outerHTML("<p>My brand new #myTag.</p>");

Hope this helps someone :)

Update: There's now a demo page.