Get a random boolean in python

Question

I am looking for the best way  fast and elegant  to get a random boolean in python  flip a coin    For the moment I am using random randint 0  1  or random getrandbits 1    Are there better choices that I am not aware of

User · Answer

If you want to generate a number of random booleans you could use numpy's random module. From the documentation

np.random.randint(2, size=10)

will return 10 random uniform integers in the open interval [0,2). The size keyword specifies the number of values to generate.

User · Answer

random choice  True  False     would also work

User · Answer

Adam s answer is quite fast  but I found that random getrandbits 1  to be quite a lot faster  If you really want a boolean instead of a long then  bool random getrandbits 1     is still about twice as fast as random choice  True  False    Both solutions need to import random  If utmost speed isn t to priority then random choice definitely reads better    python -m timeit -s  import random   random choice  True  False    1000000 loops  best of 3  0 904 usec per loop   python -m timeit -s  import random   random choice  True  False     1000000 loops  best of 3  0 846 usec per loop   python -m timeit -s  import random   random getrandbits 1   1000000 loops  best of 3  0 286 usec per loop   python -m timeit -s  import random   bool random getrandbits 1    1000000 loops  best of 3  0 441 usec per loop   python -m timeit -s  import random   not random getrandbits 1   1000000 loops  best of 3  0 308 usec per loop   python -m timeit -s  from random import getrandbits   not getrandbits 1   1000000 loops  best of 3  0 262 usec per loop    not takes about 20us of this   Added this one after seeing  Pavel s answer    python -m timeit -s  from random import random   random    lt  0 5  10000000 loops  best of 3  0 115 usec per loop

User · Answer

I like   np random rand    gt   5

User · Answer

You could use the Faker library  it s mainly used for testing  but is capable of providing a variety of fake data   Install  https   pypi org project Faker    gt  gt  gt  from faker import Faker  gt  gt  gt  fake   Faker    gt  gt  gt  fake pybool   True

User · Answer

Found a faster method     python -m timeit -s  from random import getrandbits   not getrandbits 1   10000000 loops  best of 3  0 222 usec per loop   python -m timeit -s  from random import random   True if random    gt  0 5 else False  10000000 loops  best of 3  0 0786 usec per loop   python -m timeit -s  from random import random   random    gt  0 5  10000000 loops  best of 3  0 0579 usec per loop

User · Answer

u could try this it produces randomly generated array of true and false   a  bool i  for i in np array np random randint 0 2 10    out    True  True  True  True  True  False  True  False  True  False

User · Answer

I was curious as to how the speed of the numpy answer performed against the other answers since this was left out of the comparisons  To generate one random bool this is much slower but if you wanted to generate many then this becomes much faster     python -m timeit -s  from random import random   random    lt  0 5  10000000 loops  best of 3  0 0906 usec per loop   python -m timeit -s  import numpy as np   np random randint 2  size 1   100000 loops  best of 3  4 65 usec per loop    python -m timeit -s  from random import random   test    random    lt  0 5 for i in range 1000000    10 loops  best of 3  118 msec per loop   python -m timeit -s  import numpy as np   test   np random randint 2  size 1000000   100 loops  best of 3  6 31 msec per loop

User · Answer

A new take on this question would involve the use of Faker which you can install easily with pip   from faker import Factory   ---------------------------------------------------------------------- def create values fake                  print fake boolean chance of getting true 50    True     print fake random int min 0  max 1    1  if   name         main         fake   Factory create       create values fake

[python] Get a random boolean in python?

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