How to randomly select an item from a list?

Question

Assume I have the following list:

foo = [\'a\', \'b\', \'c\', \'d\', \'e\']

What is the simplest way to retrieve an item at random from thi

Answer 1

Random item selection:

import random

my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
num_selections = 2

new_list = random.sample(my_list, num_selections)

To preserve the order of the list, you could do:

randIndex = random.sample(range(len(my_list)), n_selections)
randIndex.sort()
new_list = [my_list[i] for i in randIndex]

Duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/a/49682832/4383027

Answer 2

foo = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']
number_of_samples = 1

In python 2:

random_items = random.sample(population=foo, k=number_of_samples)

In python 3:

random_items = random.choices(population=foo, k=number_of_samples)

Answer 3

You could just:

from random import randint

foo = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]

print(foo[randint(0,4)])