Question

I am new at programming. I am trying to match a number (given by the user) to the numeric values of words in a file. Example a=1. b=2, c=3, A=1, B=2, so that if the user enters “2” then the output would be all words in the list that match 2.

userinput = raw_input("Please, enter the gematric value of the word: ")
inputfile = open('c:/school/dictionarytest.txt', 'r')
inputfile.lower()
output = []
for word in inputfile:
    userinput = ord(character) - 96
    output.append(character)
    print output
inputfile.close()

I am somewhat new at this and the syntax is not that familiar. Could someone please help? Thank you

Edit1- example the user enters the number 7. If the word bad (b=2,a=1,d=4) is on the list the output would be “bad”, and any other words that match the addition of their characters.

Answer 1

Here’s the code with comments that describe it in detail:

# ask user for an input until an integer is provided
prompt = "Please, enter the gematric value of the word: "
while True: # infinite loop
    try:        
        # ask user for an input; convert it to integer immediately
        userinput = int(raw_input(prompt))
    except ValueError: # `int()` can't parse user input as an integer
        print('the gematric value must be an integer. Try again')
    else:
        break # got an integer successfully; exit the loop

# use `with` statement to close the file automatically
# `'r'` is default; you don't need to specify it explicitly
with open(r'c:\school\dictionarytest.txt') as inputfile:
    #XXX inputfile.lower() # WRONG!!! file object doesn't have .lower() method

    # assuming `dictionarytest.txt` has one word per line
    for word in inputfile: # read the file line by line
        word = word.strip() # strip leading/trailing whitespace
        if gematric_value(word) == userinput:
           print(word) # print words that match user input

Where gematric_value() function is:

def gematric_value(word):
    """Sum of numerical values of word's characters.

    a -> 1, b -> 2, c -> 3; A -> 1, B -> 2, etc
    """
    # word is a string; iterating over it produces individual "characters"
    # iterate over lowercased version of the word (due to A == a == 1)
    return sum(ord(c) - ord('a') + 1 for c in word.lower())

Note: don’t use the above comment style in your code. It is acceptable only for educational purposes. You should assume that a reader of your code is familiar with Python.