Hi BrowserUk,

Thanks very much for this. Unfortunately, this syntax is above my head, though I would like to understand it. For starters, what exactly am I passing to "genPicker"? A file handle? A file name? I made a space-delimited file with A, B and C in the first column and the frequencies in the second column and tried in various ways to pass that into the subroutine but without success.

my $pick = genPicker( *DATA );

What is "*DATA" here? I don't know how to get the "__DATA__" that you list near the bottom into *DATA form. Any help would be much appreciated.

Best wishes, Eric

In reply to Re^4: an algorithm to randomly pick items that are present at different frequencies by efoss
in thread an algorithm to randomly pick items that are present at different frequencies by efoss

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