Steve D'Aprano wrote: > On Wed, 19 Oct 2016 07:25 am, Sayth Renshaw wrote: > >> So why can't i assign the result slice to a variable b? >> >> It just keeps getting none. > > Of course you can assign the result slice to b. You just have to do it the > right way. > > You keep getting None because you do it the wrong way. Unfortunately you > aren't showing us your code, so we have no idea what you are doing wrong. > My guess is that you are doing something like this: > > > a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] > b = random.shuffle(a)[0:3] > > That's wrong -- shuffle() modifies the list you pass, and returns None. > You cannot take a slice of None. Try this: > > a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] > random.shuffle(a) > b = a[0:3] > print(b)
But once you understand how it works consider >>> a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] >>> random.sample(a, 3) [1, 5, 2] instead. This should be more efficient for "small" samples and leaves `a` intact: >>> a [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
