is there a shorter way to write this

[Stephen Hansen]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 6:11 AM, garywood <pythonsky at sky.com> wrote:

>  I had a task in a book to pick 5 items from a list of 26 ensuring the
> items are not repeated
>
>

If the list is unique of 26 elements is guaranteed to be unique, simply:

   >>> import random
   >>> random.sample(list, 5)
    ['g', 'y', 'i', 'n', 'x']

If the list isn't unique:

    >>> import random
    >>> random.sample(set(list), 5)
    ['r', 'e', 'b', 'k', 'i']

If you want to combine them all into a single word as you do in your
example:

    >>> import random
    >>> ''.join(random.sample(set(list), 5))
    'wmhsq'

--Stephen
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