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Python Python Basics (2015) Letter Game App Congratulations!

Yosef Fastow
Yosef Fastow
18,526 Points
Posted by Yosef Fastow
Yosef Fastow
18,526 Points

How I answered the Extra credit for the letter game app.

Instead of putting every word on a different line in the text file I put it on one line and than made it into a list in the program. Is there a reason to loop through the list instead of how I did it or are both of them good options?

def pick_fruit():
    """ Picks a fruit for our secret word from a outside file. """
    txt_list = open('hangman.txt', 'r')
    fruits = txt_list.read()
    fruits = fruits.split(', ')
    fruit = random.choice(fruits)
    txt_list.closed
    return fruit

3 Answers

Chris Freeman
MOD
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,423 Points
Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,423 Points

Nice solution! Creating a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file for your data is a valid alternative way to go.

There is a Python package for reading and writing CSV files. Check out CSV.

Iain Simmons
MOD
Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 Points
Iain Simmons
Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 Points

Shiny!

Here's mine:

iainsimmons/letter_game

I made it so the user has the option of specifying the file with the words (either on the command line or after importing the script into the Python shell/REPL).

Also varies the number of allowed guesses based on the word length.

Freda Wan
Freda Wan
6,391 Points
Freda Wan
Freda Wan
6,391 Points

Here is my code for using the open() function. 

with open('words.txt') as f:
    words = f.readlines()
words = [x.strip() for x in words] 
words = [y.strip(',') for y in words]
f.close()

I realized that there are 2 approaches: 1) we could open the file, read the list, use random.choice() to pick a secret_word, and close the file. 2) we could open the file, read the list, load the whole list as a variable in the program, close the file, and then use random.choice() to pick a word from that list.

I assume that the first approach is better when dealing with a larger list of words. Any views welcome. Thanks!