Question

I am writing a game in python in which I must periodically pull a random word from a list of words. When I prototyped my game I declared a word_list = ['cat','dog','rat','house'] of ten words at the top of one of my modules. I then use choice(word_list) to get a random word. However, I must must change this temporary hack into something more elegant because I need to increase the size of the word list to 5,000+ words. If I do this in my current module it will look ridiculous.

Should I put all of these words in a flat txt file, and then read from that file as I need words? If so, how would I best do that? Put each word an a separate line and then read one random line? I’m not sure what the most efficient way is.

Answer 1

I’d put all of the words in a flat text file, one per line:

cat
dog
....

and just load it in whenever you need it with the following one-liner:

word_list = [word.rstrip() for word in open("words.txt","r")]

See: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/datastructures.html#list-comprehensions

This solution is a tad more elegant since it doesn’t depend on anything but built-in functions. No importing modules required.

Be sure to cache it once it’s loaded, you don’t want to load the words from the file everytime you need a new word, though.