How to generate unique random numbers from a list

Question

I know that I should write a code to random numbers like the code below, but I don't know how to generate unique numbers, for example I want to generate 3 unique phone numbers from a list at once, how can I do it?

import random  

# last numbers of the phone numbers are in order, 1,2,3,4,5,6
myList = [60165651, 60175652, 60156523, 60135354, 60159535, 60192326]  

for x in range(5): 
    print(random.choice(myList))

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another problem is that if I put zero at the beginning of numbers I get an error: Token invalid!

e.g:

myPhoneList = [060165651, 60175652, 60156523, 60135354, 60159535, 60192326]

You're trying to ***sample*** the input list of numbers, not ***generate*** it (as an output). — smci, Sep 28 '19 at 08:28
And sampling N unique items is called ***sampling without replacement***. See the doc for [`random.sample`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/random.html?highlight=random.sample#random.sample) — smci, Sep 28 '19 at 08:29
2nd issue: Putting zero at the beginning of a number tells Python it's octal (base-8), but then your number can't contain the digits 8,9, that's why it throws an error. Duplicate of [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29778699/python-syntaxerror-invalid-token-on-numbers-starting-with-0-zeroes). So if you really want to have a decimal phone number with leading zero, use a list of strings, not integers. — smci, Sep 28 '19 at 08:36
There is a special module `faker` to generate a fake data. You can use it to get fake numbers as well. — Mykola Zotko, Sep 28 '19 at 08:39

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 28 '19 at 08:18

Use random.sample:

Return a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population sequence or set. Used for random sampling without replacement.

from random import sample

myList = [60165651, 60175652, 60156523, 60135354, 60159535, 60192326]  
print(sample(myList, 3))
# [60192326, 60165651, 60175652]

How to generate unique random numbers from a list

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1 Answers1