2 Ways to Get a Random Item from a List in Dart (and Flutter)

When developing apps with Flutter and Dart, there might be cases where you want to retrieve a random item from a given list (for example, an online shop wants to give a random gift to their customer; or a teacher wants to choose a random question to test students). There is no built-in function or method specifically designed for this task. However, we can easily solve it in more than one way with a few lines of code.

Method #1

In this method, we will randomly change the position of the items in the list by using the shuffle() method, then get the first one.

Example:

// kindacode.com
void main() {
  List<String> colors = ['red', 'green', 'blue', 'yellow', 'orange'];
  colors.shuffle();

  var randomColor = colors[0];
  print(randomColor);
}

Method #2

Here’s what we’ll do:

• Use Random.nextInt() to generate a random index number (in the range from 0 to list.length – 1)
• Use the random index to retrieve the corresponding list element

Example:

// kindacode.com
import 'dart:math';
void main() {
  var choices = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'];
  int randomIndex = Random().nextInt(choices.length);
  var randomChoice = choices[randomIndex];
  print(randomChoice);
}

The output can be ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, or ‘e’.

You can explore more interesting stuff related to the randomness in Flutter through the following articles:

• Flutter & Dart: 3 Ways to Generate Random Strings
• 3 Ways to create Random Colors in Flutter
• Flutter/Dart: Generate Random Numbers between Min and Max

You can also tour around our Flutter topic page or Dart topic page for the most recent tutorials and examples.