Question

Consider below example:

random_tile = random.choice(tiles)
del random_tile

It first assigns a random element from the list tiles to a variable, and then calls a function on that variable.

Then if we want to shorten the code as follows:

del random.choice(tiles)

We would get a SyntaxError: can't delete function call. I tried eval() with no luck. How can this be solved?

EDIT:

What I am trying to do is to remove a element from the tiles list at random. I thought I found a more compact way of doing it other than using random.randint() as the index, but I guess not.

Is there a pythonic/conventional way of doing this otherwise?

Answer 1

del is not a function, it is a keyword to create del statements e.g. del var. You can’t use it as a function or on a function, it can only be applied to a variable name, list of variable names or subscriptions and slicings e.g.

del a
del a,b
del l[0]
del l[:]

To remove the random item you can try this

random_tile.remove(random.choice(tiles))

BUT it is not best way to remove items because it could mean a internal search for items and item comparison, also won’t work if items are not unique, so best would be to get random index and delete that

index = random.randint(0, len(l)-1)
del l[index]