Say I have a AoA that goes something like this:

(update: I said HoA, but I meant AoA, as pointed out below by NetWallah. Or have the code slightly altered as per GrandFather's suggestion. But that really is not the point :) I'll have a look into that discussion, rhesa.)

my @array = (
    ["foo", 1],
    ["bar", 3],
    ["baz", 4],
    ["quux", 9]
);

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The numbers represent how likely it is that the string gets picked - the bigger the number, the more probable it is the string gets picked. I hope I express myself comprehendable here...

Well anyway... how would I do that? I could of course just create an array that contains each string N times, N being the number (qw(foo bar bar bar baz baz baz baz quux quux quux quux quux quux quux quux quux)) but the arrays would get rather large and this way would be quite slow.

And I guess there must be alternatives... any suggestions?

In reply to Picking a random item through probability by muba

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