I am making a hangman game in Python, and I understand how to randomly select an item from a list, but I was wondering if there was a way to randomly select the list in general.
For example, I have two lists, list1 and list2 Is there a way to randomly select between list1 and list2, and then randomly select a word from the randomly selected list.
I hope that makes sense
You could use random.choice twice:
import random first = ['one', 'word'] second = ['two', 'more', 'and'] selected = random.choice(random.choice([first, second])) print(selected) Output
word 
import random # Create a list of your lists list_of_lists = [lists1, list2, list3] # Select a random list from your list of lists random_list = random.choice(list_of_lists) # Select a random word from the randomly selected list random_word = random.choice(random_list) You can use random.choice to select a random list, and then use random.choice again to select a value from that list:
import random list1 = ['1','2','3'] list2 = ['4','5','6'] word = random.choice(random.choice([list1, list2])) The two list case if covered by other answers.
If you have an arbitrarily nested, possibly irregular list (or sequence), you can write a recursive function.
from collections import Sequence import random def go_deeper(x): return (isinstance(x, Sequence) and not isinstance(x, (str, bytes))) # and other sequence types you wish to exclude def select(candidate): if go_deeper(candidate): return select(random.choice(candidate)) return candidate Demo:
>>> l = ['foo', 'bar'] >>> select(l) 'bar' >>> >>> l = [[[(0,)]]] >>> select(l) 0 >>> >>> l = [1, 2, [3, 4, [5]], [[6, [7, 8]], 9]] >>> select(l) 9 >>> select(l) 1 >>> select(l) 2 
random.choice()that list