'module' object has no attribute 'choice' - trying to use random.choice

Question

Shot in the dark: You probably named your script random.py. Do not name your script the same name as the module.

I say this because the random module indeed has a choice method, so the import is probably grabbing the wrong (read: undesired) module.

for me the problem is I use

random.choices 

in python 3.6 local dev but the server is python3.5 don't have this method...

Sounds like an import issue. Is there another module in the same directory named random? If so (and if you're on python2, which is obvious from print random_item) then it's importing that instead. Try not to shadow built-in names.

You can test this with the following code:

import random

print random.__file__

The actual random.py module from stdlib lives in path/to/python/lib/random.py. If yours is somewhere else, this will tell you where it is.

In short, Python's looking in the first file it finds named "random", and isn't finding the choice attribute.

99.99% of the time, that means you've got a file in the path/directory that's already named "random". If that's true, rename it and try again. It should work.

I also got this error by naming a method random like this:

import random

def random():

  foo = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']

  random_item = random.choice(foo)

  print random_item

random()

It's not your case (naming a file random.py) but for others that search about this error and may make this mistake.