Golang : Randomly pick an item from a slice/array example

Problem:

You are building a game and you want to randomly pick an item from a slice of URLs. How to pick one item at random?

Solution:

You can either shuffle the items inside the slice and pick the first item or use the code example below.

pickRandomURL.go

 package main

 import (
 "fmt"
 "math/rand"
 "time"
 )

 func main() {
 URLs := []string{
 "http://top-beautiful-women.com/images/1/Japan/Erina%20Mano.jpg",
 "http://top-beautiful-women.com/images/1/Japan/Rina%20Uchiyama.jpg",
 "http://cdn2.stylecraze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/yui-aragaki.jpg",
 "http://cdn2.stylecraze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/rio-yamashita.jpg",
 }

 // randomly pick one beautiful girl(URL) from the URLs slice
 rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano())

 choosen := URLs[rand.Intn(len(URLs))]

 fmt.Println("Randomly selected this URL : ", choosen)
 }

Output:

>go run pickRandomURL.go

Randomly selected this URL : http://cdn2.stylecraze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/yui-aragaki.jpg

>go run pickRandomURL.go

Randomly selected this URL : http://top-beautiful-women.com/images/1/Japan/Erina%20Mano.jpg

References:

https://www.socketloop.com/tutorials/golang-how-to-shuffle-elements-in-array-or-slice