Regression(?) in `sample` behavior for strings

[dylemma]

Hi and thanks for the really handy library! I've had a dependency on underscore on a work project for many years now (we were using version 1.8.3) and I just merged a dependabot update which pulled in version 1.12.1 and noticed an unexpected change in the behavior of the sample function.

Previously, you could pass a string as the list argument, and it would be treated as an array of characters, e.g.

// with underscore 1.8.3
_.sample('abcdef', 3) // returns ["c", "f", "b"]
_.sample('abcdef', 3) // returns ["b", "e", "f"]

But now it just returns a substring from the beginning of the string, with no randomness

// with underscore 1.12.1+ (also tried on underscorejs.org)
_.sample('abcdef', 3) // returns "abc" every time
_.sample('abcdef', 4) // returns "abcd" every time

Other observations:

• if I don't pass an n argument, it does return a random letter, e.g. _.sample('abcdef') returns "d" or "a" etc
• it works as expected if I split the string into an array of characters e.g. _.sample(['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'], 3)

[jgonggrijp]

Thanks for reporting, @dylemma. I was able to trace this down to #2158 and confirm that this is indeed a regression, which was already introduced in 1.9.0 (ironically, right after the version you were using).

The reason is that in 1.8.3, sample/shuffle was filling a new empty array, while from 1.9.0 onwards, it starts with a clone of the input collection. It now uses _.clone for "array-like" objects, which unfortunately returns primitive values unmodified. Since primitive strings are immutable, this results in no values being permuted, explaining your issue. Singular samples are unaffected because they are handled in a separate branch that doesn't involve cloning.

Sorry about the inconvenience. I will try to address this soon. In the meanwhile, you can patch Underscore as follows so you don't have to edit your code everywhere:

var originalSample = _.sample;

function fixedSample(collection, n, guard) {
    if (_.isString(collection)) collection = _.toArray(collection);
    return originalSample(collection, n, guard);
}

_.mixin({sample: fixedSample});

[jgonggrijp]

@dylemma @KenProle fixed, will be in the next release, which I expect to be up within a day or so.