[Numpy-discussion] Random int64 and float64 numbers

[Thomas Robitaille]

Anne Archibald wrote:
> 
> If you want "random floats", I suggest generating an array of random
> bytes and reinterpreting them as floats. You'll get a fair number of
> NaNs and infinities, so you may want to take only the finite values
> and regenerate the rest. This will give you some numbers from all over
> the range of floats, including tiny values (and denormalized values,
> which are a potentially important special case).
> 

This is a very good point - I've decided to do this. For the record, here is
the function I wrote for ints:

def random_int_array(dtype, shape):
    n = np.product(shape)
    n = n * np.iinfo(dtype).bits / 8
    s = "".join(chr(random.randrange(0, 256)) for i in xrange(n))
    return np.fromstring(s, dtype=dtype).reshape(shape)

And I wrote something similar for floats.

Cheers,

Thomas
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