[New-bugs-announce] [issue40282] random.getrandbits(0) should succeed

[Antoine Pitrou]

New submission from Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>:

When creating variable-sized random binary strings with random.getrandbits(), you currently have to special case when the number of bytes is 0, because otherwise getrandbits() raises:

  ValueError: number of bits must be greater than zero

It seems like it wouldn't hurt to simply return 0 in that case.

The actual snippet looks something like:

  random.getrandombits(nbytes * 8).to_bytes(nbytes, 'little')

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messages: 366392
nosy: mark.dickinson, pitrou, rhettinger, steven.daprano
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: random.getrandbits(0) should succeed
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.9

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue40282>
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