Permanently remove an element from a list in Python?

Question

I have this Python program to play the game Celebrity ID and in my game, I have 15 rounds.

The code:

while round<15
         import random
         celeblist=["a","b","c","d","e","f"] ##and so on
         celebchoice=random.choice(celeblist)
         celeblist.remove(celebchoice)

but it is not working and I would like to know how I can delete the item from the list permanently so it is deleted for the 15 rounds.

possible duplicate of [How to remove an element from a list by index in Python?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/627435/how-to-remove-an-element-from-a-list-by-index-in-python) — aruisdante, May 04 '14 at 18:15

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 04 '14 at 18:16

Currently, you recreate the list at each iteration of the loop. You need to create the list before the loop. Also:

prefer to make a for loop with a range (which is an iterator in Python 3) instead of a while
Import random at the beginning and not in the loop

The code corrected:

import random
celeblist = ["a","b","c","d","e","f"]  # and so on

for round in range(15):
     celebchoice = random.choice(celeblist)
     print("Current elem: %s" % celebchoice)
     celeblist.remove(celebchoice)

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 04 '14 at 18:21

Why not preselect your random celebrities, one per round?

import random

celebs = [
    "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f",
    "g", "h", "i", "j", "k", "l",
    "m", "n", "o", "p", "q", "r"    # need at least 15
]

chosen = random.sample(celebs, 15)
for round,celeb in enumerate(chosen, 1):
    print("{}: {}".format(round, celeb))

which gives

1: j
2: a
3: r
4: f
5: n
6: o
7: g
8: k
9: i
10: l
11: e
12: b
13: d
14: q
15: p

Permanently remove an element from a list in Python?

2 Answers2