random.sample return only characters instead of strings

Question

Hi SO,

This is a kind of newbie question, but I couldn't find a solution. I read a list of strings from a file, and try to get a random, 5 element sample with random.sample, but the resultung list only contains characters. Why is that? How can I get a random sample list of strings?

This is what I do:

    names = random.sample( open('names.txt').read(), 5 )
    print names

This gives a five element character list like:

['\x91', 'h', 'l', 'n', 's']

If I omit the random.sample part, and print the list, it prints out every line of the file, which is the expected behaviour, and proves that the file is read OK.

Answer 1

If the names are all on seperate lines, ry the following:

names = random.sample(open('names.txt').readlines(), count)
print names

Essentially you are going wrong because you need to pass an interable to random.sample(). When you pass a string it treats it like a list. If you're names are all on one line, you need to use split() to pull them apart and pass that list to random.sample().