How to get a random value from dictionary?

Question

One way would be:

import random
d = {'VENEZUELA':'CARACAS', 'CANADA':'OTTAWA'}
random.choice(list(d.values()))

EDIT: The question was changed a couple years after the original post, and now asks for a pair, rather than a single item. The final line should now be:

country, capital = random.choice(list(d.items()))

I wrote this trying to solve the same problem:

https://github.com/robtandy/randomdict

It has O(1) random access to keys, values, and items.

If you don't want to use the random module, you can also try popitem():

>> d = {'a': 1, 'b': 5, 'c': 7}
>>> d.popitem()
('a', 1)
>>> d
{'c': 7, 'b': 5}
>>> d.popitem()
('c', 7)

Since the dict doesn't preserve order, by using popitem you get items in an arbitrary (but not strictly random) order from it.

Also keep in mind that popitem removes the key-value pair from dictionary, as stated in the docs.

popitem() is useful to destructively iterate over a dictionary

Try this:

import random
a = dict(....) # a is some dictionary
random_key = random.sample(a, 1)[0]

This definitely works.

>>> import random
>>> d = dict(Venezuela = 1, Spain = 2, USA = 3, Italy = 4)
>>> random.choice(d.keys())
'Venezuela'
>>> random.choice(d.keys())
'USA'

By calling random.choice on the keys of the dictionary (the countries).