SyntaxError: cannot assign to operator

python syntax-error

TheFoxx · Jan 21, 2012 · Viewed 183.2k times · Source

def RandomString (length,distribution):
    string = ""
    for t in distribution:
        ((t[1])/length) * t[1] += string
    return shuffle (string)

This returns a syntax error as described in the title. In this example, distribution is a list of tuples, with each tuple containing a letter, and its distribution, with all the distributions from the list adding up to 100, for example:

[("a",50),("b",20),("c",30)]

And length is the length of the string that you want.

Answer

In case it helps someone, if your variables have hyphens in them, you may see this error since hyphens are not allowed in variable names in Python and are used as subtraction operators.

Example:

my-variable = 5   # would result in 'SyntaxError: can't assign to operator'

SyntaxError: cannot assign to operator

Answer

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