'module' object has no attribute 'choice' - trying to use random.choice

Question

Could someone please tell me what I may be doing wrong. I keep getting this message when I run my python code:

import random

foo = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']

random_item = random.choice(foo)

print random_item

Error

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'choice'

Answer 1

Shot in the dark: You probably named your script random.py. Do not name your script the same name as the module.

I say this because the random module indeed has a choice method, so the import is probably grabbing the wrong (read: undesired) module.

Answer 2

for me the problem is I use

random.choices 

in python 3.6 local dev but the server is python3.5 don't have this method...

Answer 3

Sounds like an import issue. Is there another module in the same directory named random? If so (and if you're on python2, which is obvious from print random_item) then it's importing that instead. Try not to shadow built-in names.

You can test this with the following code:

import random

print random.__file__

The actual random.py module from stdlib lives in path/to/python/lib/random.py. If yours is somewhere else, this will tell you where it is.

Answer 4

In short, Python's looking in the first file it finds named "random", and isn't finding the choice attribute.

99.99% of the time, that means you've got a file in the path/directory that's already named "random". If that's true, rename it and try again. It should work.

Answer 5

I also got this error by naming a method random like this:

import random

def random():

  foo = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']

  random_item = random.choice(foo)

  print random_item

random()

It's not your case (naming a file random.py) but for others that search about this error and may make this mistake.