Quiz question!

Hi Aryan,

Here, you need to create a new function that takes an iterable as a parameter. Let's assume that's a string because that's easy to visualize. And we'll use "TREEHOUSE" as the challenge uses that as an example. However, that string is passed into the function - let's get that set up first:

def random_item(iterable):

You've correctly identified that we need to import random so let's add that too:

import random

def random_item(iterable):

That's where you made it to. We're going to use random to pick a number that's between zero and the length of the iterable passed in. Let's create a store for that value and use the len() method to get the number we need. Pass the iterable into the len() method - it'll return the number of characters in the string, in our case.:

import random

def random_item(iterable):
    length = len(iterable)

What we want to do now is to generate a random number between zero (the first index element of the iterable) and the length of the iterable, minus one (because we started at zero). We'll store that in another variable - I called it index. The random.randint() method generates a number for us. It takes two parameters, the lower & upper bounds. We know those already; zero and length - 1. That gives us:

import random
def random_item(iterable):
    length = len(iterable) 
    index = random.randint(0, length - 1)

We then want to return the character at index of iterable. Use square brackets:

import random
def random_item(iterable):
    length = len(iterable) 
    index = random.randint(0, length - 1)
    return iterable[index]

We could tidy that up a bit and not have the index variable; just return the expression inside the square brackets:

import random
def random_item(iterable):
    length = len(iterable) 
    return iterable[random.randint(0, length - 1)]

I hope that helps, and makes sense.

Steve.