Bugs item #1460340, was opened at 2006-03-29 00:05 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by phr You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=1460340&group_id=5470
Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: Python Library Group: Python 2.3 Status: Closed Resolution: Fixed Priority: 5 Submitted By: paul rubin (phr) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: random.sample can raise KeyError Initial Comment: I have only tested this in 2.3 and the relevant code in random.py has changed in the current svn branch, but from inspection it looks to me like the bug may still be there. If you initialize a dictionary as follows: a={}.fromkeys(range(10)+range(10,100,2)+range(100,110)) then random.sample(a,3) raises KeyError most times that you call it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Comment By: paul rubin (phr) Date: 2006-03-29 09:46 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=72053 I don't think the fix at 43421 is quite right, but I can't easily test it in my current setup. Suppose a = dict.fromkeys(range(99) + ['x']) b = random.sample(a,1) 99% of the time, there's no KeyError and b gets set to [j] where j is some random integer. 1% of the time, there's a KeyError, random.sample is called recursively, and the recursive call returns [some integer j] 99% of the time, and returns ['x'] 1% of the time. So in total, ['x'] gets returned .01% of the time instead of 1% of the time. I think it's better to not set result[i]=population[j] inside the loop. Instead, just build up the selected set until it has enough indices; then try to make a result list using those indices, and if there's a KeyError, convert the population to a list and use the same selection set to make the results. gbrandl also correctly points out that a dict is not a sequence type, so maybe it's ok to just punt on dicts. But it's obvious from the code comments that somebody once wanted dicts to work, and it's reasonable for people to want sets to work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Raymond Hettinger (rhettinger) Date: 2006-03-29 09:17 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=80475 Checked-in a fix. See revision 43420 and 43421. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Georg Brandl (gbrandl) Date: 2006-03-29 09:11 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=849994 random.sample is documented to take a sequence as its first argument. A dict is not a sequence type. I think you want random.sample(a.keys(), 3) or, for large dicts, random.sample(a.iterkeys(), 3) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=1460340&group_id=5470 _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com