[Wellington-pm] Select at random from a list

[Grant McLean]

On Sat, 2006-07-15 at 16:49 +1200, michael at diaspora.gen.nz wrote:
> Philip Plane writes:
> >$mp3 = $playlist[int(rand(scalar(@playlist)))];
> 
> One feature I found when playing with Python recently that I really
> liked was a better method of choosing a random element from an array:
> 
>     >>> import random
>     >>> random.choice([1,2,3,4])
>     2
>     >>> random.sample([1,2,3,4], 2)
>     [4, 2]
>     >>> x = [1,2,3,4]
>     >>> random.shuffle(x)
>     >>> x
>     [3, 1, 2, 4]
> 
> A quick look on CPAN doesn't seem to reveal such a convenient module.
> Anyone seen one, or should I think about a port?

It does seem like the sort of thing that ought to be on CPAN, but I'm
not aware of any implementation either.

The TODO list for the List::MoreUtils module does include 'random_item'
so you could submit a patch to the maintainer of that module.  That
approach would have the added advantage of not leaving you with the
burden of maintaining the code :-)

  http://search.cpan.org/dist/List-MoreUtils/lib/List/MoreUtils.pm#TODO

Cheers
Grant