I'm working on another exercise now about generating random numbers for the lottery. What I want to do is write a function that picks 5 random numbers from 1-53 and returns them. Here's what I have so far:
numbers = range(1, 54) def genNumbers(): for x in range(5): fiveNumbers = [] number = random.choice(numbers) numbers.remove(number) fiveNumbers = fiveNumbers.append(number) return fiveNumbers Other than being sort of ugly, this also has the side effect of actually editing the original list, which I don't want since I will want to generate more than one set of numbers. Is there a better way to extract a certain number of items from a list (so maybe I don't need the for loop)? Is a list even the right type to use, since it gets edited in place? Perhaps a set? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list