Randomizing text files in a book

[wishingstar]

As I'm organizing my library, I'm combining a bunch of articles by topic into collections. I have these articles downloaded as html files, and placed in folders by topic. So basically what I do is:

1. Create an empty epub
2. Import all html files from a given folder into it
3. Perform any necessary html cleaning
4. Create a ToC from files (in the cleaning step, each file starts with the title of the article in <h> tags)
5. Save the book, fill in metadata, and add a cover

Now my question is about ordering the articles.

The way outlined here means the articles will be added in alphabetical order, which is okay in principle, but I'm wondering if I can add some 'variety' into the collection by somehow randomizing the order of the html files in the book.

I know I can drag the individual html files around, but that's impractical with 100+ articles. Is there a way to randomize the files automatically, or to write a script to randomize the files on import somehow?

[kovidgoyal]

If you can script you can simply use conversion to do this in an automated fashion. https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq...specific-order

[wishingstar]

Thank you, I followed something similar to your suggestion, only I did the randomization in a python script outside of calibre before importing. Here's the script I used in case anyone is interested. Basically, the script adds a random prefix to each file name, and then I import them into the book editor, which will now be in the new order determined by the random prefix.

import os
import random

path = r"path\\to\\folder\\"  # note: using double slashes because windows
string_to_draw_from = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789"
for file in os.listdir(path):
    letters = ''.join(random.choices(string_to_draw_from, k=2)) + '_'  # 2 random letters as prefix
    os.rename(path+file, f"{path}{letters}{file}")