Shuffle Array in PHP

Shuffling an array in PHP is fairly straightforward, thanks to the language’s built-in shuffle function.

Here is an example of shuffling a simple array using shuffle():

$colors = ['red', 'blue', 'yellow'];
$shuffledColors = shuffle($colors);

Safer array shuffling

We can also create a custom wrapper around the shuffle function to ensure each passed item is actually an array:

function safeShuffle($arr) {
    if (!is_array($arr) {
        $arr = array($arr);
    }
    return shuffle($arr);
}

Conclusion

I use shuffle() quite often, and I definitely see it as one of the “essential” built-in functions in PHP.

Anyway, I hope you found this short tutorial useful!