I may not understand fully how random works.
Say I have a table with 5 rows stored in 'temp'
random[temp,1] will usually get me a row with all the data, But sometimes it just results in the integer 1.The Lil "comma" operator forms a list by combining the elements of its left and right arguments.
If you use this operator to combine a table and a number, the table will be coerced to its list interpretation (a list of the rows of the table, each a dictionary), and then combined with the number 1 (whose only element is itself), forming a list of several dictionaries and the number 1. Applied to such a list, random[] will occasionally choose the 1.
When you call a Lil function with multiple arguments, commas should not be placed between arguments. You probably meant
random[temp 1]
Instead of
random[temp,1]
Furthermore, note that if you specify 1 as a second argument to random[] you will get a length-1 list as a result, whereas if you call random[] with only a single argument you will get a single value.
In preparing this post I have also observed that there is some inconsistency between native-decker and web-decker with respect to applying random[] to table values, which may have compounded the confusion; I'll have this fixed in the v1.41 release tomorrow. In the meantime the alternative is to explicitly crack the table into rows before making a random selection, like so:
random[(rows temp)]