Write selected (random) columns to output-file

[anjohepa]

Hello everyone,

I am about to take a random sample (n = 2) from a tab-separated "ran.txt"-file displayed right below, but I only want to print the first and second column to a new output-file "out.txt".
So far, I have managed to take the sample with the code you can see below. I have used linesstr = ''.join(rl) to join lines to a printable string, which surely is part of my problem.

So my question is: what would be the right code to print line[0] and line[1] to a new file? I was thinking about a loop, but a I don't know how to combine it with the random.sample(input.readlines(). Any ideas?

input-file "ran.txt":

Output:
45378	BNA	125	CALEC
74231	BNA	125	CALEC
469	FSE	176	CALEC
2347893	FSE	176	CALEX
4273897	KLW	089	CALEX

output in "out.txt" should be for example:

Output:
74231	BNA
4273897	KLW

Here is the code and output I achieved the n=2 sample with:

import os
import io
import random

os.chdir("...")
input = io.open("ran.txt","r", encoding="utf-8")
rl = random.sample(input.readlines(),2)

out = open("out.txt", "w", encoding="utf-8")
linesstr = ''.join(rl)
print(linesstr, file=out)

input.close()
output.close()

Output:
74231	BNA	125	CALEC
469	FSE	176	CALEC

I tried to replace the code for writing into the output-file by the following, but it will only give me one random line, not the first column. Obviously, readlines() has to be done in another way...

out = open("out.txt", "w", encoding = "utf-8")
print(rl[0], file=out)

Thanks for your help!