Random Selection in Python is Easy with the random Module.

Python provides a module called random that contains methods for generating random numbers. We can use these methods to randomly select elements from lists or data structures. This process of select …

Updated November 14, 2023

Python provides a module called “random” that contains methods for generating random numbers. We can use these methods to randomly select elements from lists or data structures. This process of selecting an element at random and not repeating until all elements have been chosen is known as sampling without replacement, or resampling in the statistical context.

import random

# Assuming `list` is your list of items
selected_item = random.choice(list)
print(selected_item)

This simple program will randomly select and print one item from the given list. The ‘random’ module also has other methods like ‘shuffle’ that we can use to rearrange or shuffle a list in place, which might be useful for some applications.

Note: If the list is extremely long and you don’t want Python to take extra memory by creating copies of it during operations, you may consider using random.sample function instead. It generates a new list containing unique elements chosen from the sequence you provide with replacement. For example:

import random
# Assuming `list` is your long list of items
selected_items = random.sample(list, k=5) # select 5 items randomly without repetition
print(selected_items)
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