On Sat, 08 Oct 2005 12:48:26 -0400, Jesse Noller wrote: > Once main_list is populated, I want to build a sequence from items > within the lists, "randomly" with a defined percentage of the sequence > coming for the various lists. For example, if I want a 6 item > sequence, I might want: > > 60% from list 1 (main_list[0]) > 30% from list 2 (main_list[1]) > 10% from list 3 (main_list[2])
If you are happy enough to match the percentages statistically rather than exactly, simply do something like this: pr = random.random() if pr < 0.6: list_num = 0 elif pr < 0.9: list_num = 1 else: list_num = 2 return random.choice(main_list[list_num]) or however you want to extract an item. On average, this will mean 60% of the items will come from list1 etc, but for small numbers of trials, you may have significant differences. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list