Random Line Picker

Picking one or several lines

Each non-empty line is one entry. Press the pick button to draw one entry, or set How many to pick to draw several at once, listed in the order they were drawn (useful for 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes). Earlier draws in this session are listed under Earlier picks this session, so you can show the history.

With or without repeats

By default a line can be picked only once per draw, like drawing names from a hat. Tick Allow the same line to be picked twice to put each name back after it's drawn, like rolling a die. Ignore duplicate lines (on by default) gives every distinct entry exactly one chance even if it was pasted twice; untick it when entries are tickets and someone bought several.

Fair giveaways: how the randomness works

Picks use crypto.getRandomValues, the browser's cryptographically secure random number generator, not Math.random. Numbers are drawn with rejection sampling so there's no modulo bias: with 8 entries each has exactly a 1 in 8 chance. Several winners are drawn with a partial Fisher–Yates shuffle, so every combination of winners is equally likely.

For a transparent giveaway, publish the entry list first, run the draw on a screen recording or live stream, and keep the time of the draw shown under the result.

Removing duplicates first

If entries were collected from comments or a form, the same person may appear several times with different capitalization or spacing. Ignore duplicate lines treats lines as equal regardless of case and surrounding spaces. For more control, such as finding entries that appear in two lists, clean the list first with remove duplicate lines or compare two lists. To shuffle the whole list, use sort lines with Random shuffle.