Dear Pythonites
I am looking for a more elegant solution to a piece of code that is too unwieldy and reptitive. The purpose of the code is for a new addition to a list to check whether it is a duplicate of a list element already a member of that list, and if so to regenerate itself randomly and to perform the same check again until such time as it is unique.
For example, this is what I am currently doing:
=============code block ========================
# generate unique numbers and append to list
nmbr01 = random.randrange( 1, 20 )
nmbr_list.append( nmbr01 )
nmbr02 = random.randrange( 1, 20 )
# check for duplicates and re-generate a number if needed
while nmbr02 in nmbr_list:
nmbr02 = random.randrange( 1, 20 )
nmbr_list.append( nmbr02 )
nmbr03 = random.randrange( 1, 20 )
while nmbr03 in nmbr_list:
nmbr03 = random.randrange( 1, 20 )
nmbr.append( nmbr03 )
================================================
This method works, but increasing the numbers to be appended makes the code excessively long. I can't see anything in list methods that seems to do the trick, so anybody want to make a suggestion please?
TIA /j _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
Well I would start by doing something like.
nmbr_list = []
value = int(raw_input("Input the number of items you wish to generate"))
for i in range(value):
if i == 0:
nmbr = random.randrange( 1, 20 )
nmbr_list.append( nmbr01 )
else:
nmbr = random.randrange( 1, 20 )
# check for duplicates and re-generate a number if needed
while nmbr in nmbr_list:
nmbr = random.randrange( 1, 20 )
nmbr_list.append( nmbr )
I hope that helps. or gives you an idea.
Jeff
_______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
