Last year I made a blog post about a Secret Santa picker HERE, but to use it required quite a bit of messing around with the code. So this year I decided to improve the whole thing by making it a function rather than a script. The function take two inputs, a list of names and a number of names. The code for the function is listed first followed by the code for the script used to call the function.

Here’s the function. Nothing needs to be changed in this code for it to run properly.

# make a function 
secret_santa <-function(npeople, names){
  
  # this 'flag' is used to determine if the
  # function stays in or out of the while function
  flag = "bad"
  
  # first list of names
  namelist1 = matrix(names, ncol = 1, nrow = npeople)
  fam = matrix(ncol = 1, nrow = npeople, NA)
  
  while (flag == "bad"){
    
    # names to choose from
    namelist2 = matrix(ncol = 1, nrow = npeople, NA)
    
    for (i in 1:npeople){
      #pick the first name
      if (i==1){
        xx2 = sample(names, (npeople-i+1), replace=FALSE)
      } else
        xx2 = sample(xx2, (npeople-i+1), replace=FALSE)
      
      if (i == npeople & xx2[1]==namelist1[i,1]){
        flag = "bad"
        
      }else if(xx2[1]!= namelist1[i,1]){
        namelist2[i,1] = xx2[1]
        flag = "good"
      } else{
        namelist2[i,1] = xx2[2]
        flag = "good"
        }
      
      
      #set up the new matrix with one less name
      used = which(xx2==namelist2[i])
      xx2[used] = "zzzzz"
      xx2 = sort(xx2)[1:(npeople-i)]
    }
    
    #flag
    #add "has" to the matrix
    has = matrix(ncol=1, nrow = npeople, "has")
    
    #build the final matrices
    final = cbind(namelist1, has, namelist2)	
    #the final results
    #final
    
    
  }
  final
}

Save this function as “secret-santa-function.R” and we’ll call it from our script. Okay, now let’s make our script.

# call the function from the script
source("secret-santa-function.R")

### Function input
### make a list of names
names = c("James","Nick","Emily","Natasha","Bob", "Teddy")
n = length(names)

#call the function
output <-secret_santa(n, names)
output 

The list of names is the only input needed. In the case above it’s ‘names = c(“James”,”Nick”,”Emily”,”Natasha”,”Bob”, “Teddy”)’. The other variable the function needs is the number of names, which is read automatically from the length function. That’s it, you’re done. Call the function from the script and you’ve got your names.