Question

I looked over Python Docs (I may have misunderstood), but I didn’t see that there was a way to do this (look below) without calling a recursive function.
What I’d like to do is generate a random value which excludes values in the middle.

In other words,
Let’s imagine I wanted X to be a random number that’s not in
range(a - b, a + b)
Can I do this on the first pass,
or
1. Do I have to constantly generate a number,
2. Check if in range(),
3. Wash rinse ?

As for why I don’t wish to write a recursive function,
1. it ‘feels like’ I should not have to
2. the set of numbers I’m doing this for could actually end up being quite large, and
… I hear stack overflows are bad, and I might just be being overly cautious in doing this.

I’m sure that there’s a nice, Pythonic, non-recursive way to do it.

Answer 1

Use random.choice().
In this example, a is your lower bound, the range between b and c is skipped and d is your upper bound.

import random
numbers = range(a,b) + range(c,d)
r = random.choice(numbers)