How to Generate a Random Number Between 0 and 1 in Python

We will see in this article how to generate a random number between 0 and 1 in python

Introduction

In the python language, there is a random module that is used to generate different random numbers. In this module, many methods are defined to generate random numbers with different datatypes. Here are the methods that we will deal with in this tutorial:

• randrange(): this method returns a random number within a range.
• random(): returns a floating-point number between 0 and 1.
• uniform(): returns a floating-point random number between two given parameters.
• Using numpy random.uniform()

Python generate random number

Generate Random Number Using randrange()

# randrange()

import random          
print(random.randrange(0,1))

This function will always return the value 0 because the return value is always an integer. We will see later on other methods that allow to return floats.

Generate Random Number Using random()

# random() 

import random
for i in range(0, 1):
    print("Number generated: %s " % random.random())

Number generated: 0.4923345546583948 

We see that the function has generated a number between 0 and 1. Here we use a loop to specify on which interval we must generate our number.

Generate Random Number Using uniform()

# uniform() 

import random
print("Number generated: %s " % random.uniform(0, 1)) 

This will generate a floating-point random number between 0 and 1 at each execution.

You can generate a large number of random numbers and store them in a list to see the distribution of the random numbers generated.

import random
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

list_random = [random.uniform(0, 1) for i in range(1000)]
plt.hist(list_random, density=1)
plt.show()

We can see that the distribution of each value obtained is not totally uniform.

Generate Random Number Using numpy random.uniform()

# using numpy module 

import numpy as np

r_number = np.random.uniform(0, 1)
print(r_number)

>>> 0.15335820879348916

We can see that the function has generated a random number between 0 and 1. It is possible to modify the interval, for example to obtain a number between 0 and 100.

Conclusion

We have seen in this tutorial that there are many methods to generate a random number between 0 and 1. These methods are widely used by programmers. These functions also allow you to generate a number on an interval defined by yourself which gives you the possibility to modify it according to your needs.

I hope this tutorial has helped you to understand better how to generate a random number. Anyway, I’m still available if you have any questions about this subject!

See you soon.

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