Itertools question: how to call a function n times?

[Matthew Wilson]

I want to write a function that each time it gets called, it returns a
random choice of 1 to 5 words from a list of words.

I can write this easily using for loops and random.choice(w ordlist) and
random.randint( 1, 5).

But I want to know how to do this using itertools, since I don't like
manually doing stuff like:

phrase = list()
for i in random.randint( 1, 5):

phrase.append(r andom.choice(wo rdlist))

It just seems slow.

All advice welcome.

TIA

Matt

--
A better way of running series of SAS programs:
http://tplus1.com/wilsonwiki/SasAndMakefiles

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Matthew Wilson a écrit :

I want to write a function that each time it gets called, it returns a
random choice of 1 to 5 words from a list of words.

I can write this easily using for loops and random.choice(w ordlist) and
random.randint( 1, 5).

But I want to know how to do this using itertools, since I don't like
manually doing stuff like:

phrase = list()
for i in random.randint( 1, 5):

phrase.append(r andom.choice(wo rdlist))

what's wrong with:

phrases = [random.choice(w ordList) for i in random.randint( 1, 5)]

[Wojciech =?iso-8859-2?Q?Mu=B3a?=]

Matthew Wilson wrote:

I want to write a function that each time it gets called, it returns a
random choice of 1 to 5 words from a list of words.

I can write this easily using for loops and random.choice(w ordlist) and
random.randint( 1, 5).

But I want to know how to do this using itertools, since I don't like
manually doing stuff like:

phrase = list()
for i in random.randint( 1, 5):

phrase.append(r andom.choice(wo rdlist))

Use list comprehension:

phrase = [random.choice(w ordlist) for i in xrange(random.r andint(1, 5))]

w.

[Stargaming]

Matthew Wilson schrieb:

I want to write a function that each time it gets called, it returns a
random choice of 1 to 5 words from a list of words.

I can write this easily using for loops and random.choice(w ordlist) and
random.randint( 1, 5).

But I want to know how to do this using itertools, since I don't like
manually doing stuff like:

phrase = list()
for i in random.randint( 1, 5):

phrase.append(r andom.choice(wo rdlist))

It just seems slow.

All advice welcome.

TIA

Matt

You could do it either using the previously suggested list comprehension
way or, if you don't need to have all choices in memory at once, use
generator expressions. They're basically like list comprehensions,
except that you wrap them into parentheses (), not brackets [].

phrase = (random.choice( wordlist) for i in xrange(random.r andint(1, 5)))

You loose the ability to slice it directly (eg. phrase[3]), though. (See
itertools.islic e for a way to do it.)

HTH,
Stargaming

[jrbj]

On Jul 19, 8:35 am, Matthew Wilson <[e-mail] mwrote:

I want to write a function that each time it gets called, it returns a
random choice of 1 to 5 words from a list of words.

I can write this easily using for loops and random.choice(w ordlist) and
random.randint( 1, 5).

But I want to know how to do this using itertools, since I don't like
manually doing stuff like:

phrase = list()
for i in random.randint( 1, 5):

phrase.append(r andom.choice(wo rdlist))

All the previous suggestions in this thread are good. If you *must*
use itertools, you can use the itertools.repea t function to return an
object x many times:

phrase = [somewords(wordl ist) for somewords in
itertools.repea t(random.choice , random.randint( 1, 5))]
Hope it helps,
John