Create random distributed groups

Create random distributed groups is a utility to create distributed random groups of a list of input items. By "distributed random" it means that:

• Items are distributed as evenly as possible;
• Items are not duplicated inside a group;
• Items are never assigned after each other.

This is for example useful if you want to create randomly assigned groups of people but do not want duplicated within a group and also don't want people to be assigned two times in a row.

Usage

const createRandomDistributedGroups = require('create-random-distributed-groups');
const names = ['Bert','Ernie','Elmo','Grover','Kermit','Oscar'];
const groups = createRandomDistributedGroups(names, 10, 2);
console.log(groups);

Output will be, for example:

[
  [ 'Grover', 'Bert' ],
  [ 'Oscar', 'Ernie' ],
  [ 'Elmo', 'Kermit' ],
  [ 'Ernie', 'Bert' ],
  [ 'Grover', 'Elmo' ],
  [ 'Oscar', 'Kermit' ],
  [ 'Bert', 'Grover' ],
  [ 'Kermit', 'Oscar' ],
  [ 'Ernie', 'Elmo' ],
  [ 'Grover', 'Kermit' ]
]

CLI Usage

The CLI reads from stdin, so you can use pipes and input redirection to provide the input data. For example, given a file input.txt with the contents:

Bert
Ernie
Elmo
Grover
Kermit
Oscar

npx create-random-distributed-groups --amount=10 --group-size=2 < input.txt

Output will be, for example:

Oscar Bert
Elmo Ernie
Kermit Grover
Ernie Bert
Kermit Grover
Oscar Elmo
Ernie Grover
Bert Oscar
Kermit Elmo
Grover Bert

By default the CLI splits input on newlines (\n character) but you can use the --separator parameter to change that, for example:

echo  "Bert,Ernie,Elmo,Oscar,Kermit,Grover" | npx create-random-distributed-groups --amount=10 --group-size=2 --separator=","