generate random digits with length of 5

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

Tim Chase:
> I suspect that the zfill responses don't have the property of equally
> distributed "randomness", as the first digit may more likely be a zero.

This code I have shown before:
str(randrange(100000)).zfill(5)

If the numbers are equally distributed in [0, 99999], then the leading
zeros have the correct distribution.

A little test program for you:

from string import digits
from random import choice, randrange
from collections import defaultdict

def main():
    N = 1000000

    freqs1 = defaultdict(int)
    for i in xrange(N):
        n = "".join(choice(digits) for d in xrange(5))
        freqs1[n[0]] += 1
    print [freqs1[str(i)] for i in xrange(10)]

    freqs2 = defaultdict(int)
    for i in xrange(N):
        n = str(randrange(100000)).zfill(5)
        freqs2[n[0]] += 1
    print [freqs2[str(i)] for i in xrange(10)]

import psyco; psyco.full()
main()

The output:
[100153, 99561, 99683, 100297, 99938, 100162, 99738, 100379, 100398,
99691]
[99734, 100153, 100091, 100683, 99580, 99676, 99671, 100131, 100102,
100179]

Of course with a bit of math you can also demonstrate it :-)

Bye,
bearophile