从列表列表中随机选择X个列表

Question

I have something like the following:

pen = [1, 2, 3, 4]
pencil = [2,3,4,5]
paper = [3,4,5,6]
group_of_items = [pen, pencil, paper]

I want to randomly select a certain number of lists from this list of lists so that the result is something like this:

[pencil, pen]

I found the following from another question (altered to match my situation).

import random

pen = [1, 2, 3, 4]
pencil = [2,3,4,5]
paper = [3,4,5,6]

group_of_items = [pen, pencil, paper]

num_to_select = 2
list_of_random_items = random.sample(group_of_items, num_to_select)
print(list_of_random_items)

It gives something like this.

[[2, 3, 4, 5], [1, 2, 3, 4]]

So, it's close but no cigar. I also found this.

import numpy as np

pen = [1, 2, 3, 4]
pencil = [2,3,4,5]
paper = [3,4,5,6]
group_of_items = [pen, pencil, paper]
num_to_select = 2

random_list = np.random.choice(group_of_items, num_to_select, replace=False)

print(random_list)

But it doesn't work with a list of lists (multi-dimensional).

How can I accomplish my goal?

Oh, and I don't want any repeats.

Note: my coding experience is rather limited. I mostly copy and paste what I find online, only making small changes.

Edit : The above is simply a quickly thrown together test. What I've built is a Twitter tweet bot using PythonAnywhere. It works wonderfully as is, but I want to add a more random functionality to it.

I have lists of tweets in a Google spreadsheet that I pull over to a Python list, like so:

quotes = tweet_sheet.col_values(3)

I have several lists like this that I put together in one master list of lists. But I don't want to tweet from every list every time I run the program.

Right now I use something like this.

sources = [tips,feed,quotes... etc...

I want to pick x number of lists from the master list of lists to use when the program runs. (That's worded kind of funny)

I'm guessing from the comments so far that what I have above would work. With a little more tweaking of the rest of the code, that is.

Answer 1

Here is an approach using dictionaries:

>>> pen = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> pencil = [2,3,4,5]
>>> paper = [3,4,5,6]
>>> item_dict = {'pen':pen, 'pencil':pencil, 'paper':paper}
>>> import random
>>> item_names = list(item_dict.keys())
>>> item_names
['pencil', 'pen', 'paper']
>>> sample = random.sample(item_names,2)
>>> sample
['pencil', 'pen']
>>> item_dict[sample[0]]
[2, 3, 4, 5]
>>> item_dict[sample[1]]
[1, 2, 3, 4]

So now you have an association between strings and lists :

>>> "The first list sampled was {}. Here's the list {}".format(sample[0], item_dict[sample[0]])
"The first list sampled was pencil. Here's the list [2, 3, 4, 5]"
>>>