How to get n elements randomly from an array in JavaScript

In a previous blog post we covered how to randomly select a value from an array which can be a great utility if you need to generate test data or populate your database. Recently though I found myself in a situation where I wanted to select not one but multiple items randomly. Luckily for me doing this was relatively simple:

const tags = ['Web', 'C#', 'Node.js', 'JavaScript', 'Java', 'PHP'];

// Jumble array
const jumbledTags = tags.sort(() => 0.5 - Math.random());

// Get sub-array of first n elements after jumbled
const randomTags = jumbledTags.slice(0, 3);

console.log(randomTags);

//  ['C#', 'Web', 'JavaScript']

This method isn't particularly efficient nor is it truly random but it is perfectly suitable for most situations. If you plan on using this random function a lot throughout one of your projects you can add it to Array.prototype like so:

Array.prototype.sampleSize = function (n) {
  const jumbled = this.sort(() => 0.5 - Math.random());
  return jumbled.slice(0, n);
};

const tags = ['Web', 'C#', 'Node.js', 'JavaScript', 'Java', 'PHP'];

const randomTags = tags.sampleSize(3);

console.log(randomTags);

// ['JavaScript', 'Web', 'PHP']