How to choose a random item from a sequence in Python

Sunday, May 31st, 2009
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To choose a random item from a list, use random.choice().

Here is an example.

>>> items = ['Proton', 'Honda', 'Toyota', 'Nissan']
>>> random.choice(items)
'Nissan'
>>> random.choice(items)
'Proton'
>>> random.choice(items)
'Toyota'

Another example of usage is to choose a random file from a directory.

>>> random.choice(os.listdir("C:\\"))
'ubuntu'
>>> random.choice(os.listdir("C:\\"))
'tex4ht'
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