ruby-core

Issue #12775 has been updated by Thomas Sawyer.


This definition of `#sample` seems a bit limited. I know it aligns with the statical definition but it is very easy do another way: `shuffle.take(n)`. Also, the interface is a little odd because it can return an element or an Array. Maybe it would be better if it could return repeats.

    [1,2,3,4].sample(10) => [1,2,4,3,3,4,2,1,2,3]

Then #sample could also take a block and return an enumerator when given no argument. To get one element it would be `sample.first`.

But if backward compatibility needs to be preserved, then add this functionality by another name.


P.S. It would be weird but #sample could use negative numbers to allow repeating.





----------------------------------------
Feature #12775: Random subset of array
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12775#change-60859

* Author: Tsuyoshi Sawada
* Status: Feedback
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
----------------------------------------
I often see use cases to randomly sample a subset from an array like this:

```ruby
a = [3, 2, 6, 2, 6, 1]
a.sample(rand(a.length + 1)) # => [2, 6, 6, 3]
```

I request extending `Array#sample` to let it take an option (such as `:arbitrary`) for doing that:

```ruby
a.sample(:arbitrary) # => [2, 6, 6, 3]
```

or perhaps having an independent method (like `samples`) to do it.

```ruby
a.samples # => [2, 6, 6, 3]
```




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