Get a random boolean in python?

Adam's answer is quite fast, but I found that random.getrandbits(1) to be quite a lot faster. If you really want a boolean instead of a long then

bool(random.getrandbits(1))

is still about twice as fast as random.choice([True, False])

Both solutions need to import random

If utmost speed isn't to priority then random.choice definitely reads better.

Note that random.choice() is slower than just choice() (after from random import choice) due to the attribute lookup.

$ python3 --versionPython 3.9.7$ python3 -m timeit -s "from random import choice" "choice([True, False])"1000000 loops, best of 5: 376 nsec per loop$ python3 -m timeit -s "from random import choice" "choice((True, False))"1000000 loops, best of 5: 352 nsec per loop$ python3 -m timeit -s "from random import getrandbits" "getrandbits(1)"10000000 loops, best of 5: 33.7 nsec per loop$ python3 -m timeit -s "from random import getrandbits" "bool(getrandbits(1))"5000000 loops, best of 5: 89.5 nsec per loop$ python3 -m timeit -s "from random import getrandbits" "not getrandbits(1)"5000000 loops, best of 5: 46.3 nsec per loop$ python3 -m timeit -s "from random import random" "random() < 0.5"5000000 loops, best of 5: 46.4 nsec per loop

random.choice([True, False])

would also work.

Found a faster method:

$ python -m timeit -s "from random import getrandbits" "not getrandbits(1)"10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.222 usec per loop$ python -m timeit -s "from random import random" "True if random() > 0.5 else False"10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.0786 usec per loop$ python -m timeit -s "from random import random" "random() < 0.5"10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.0579 usec per loop