Question

I’m learning CS/Python on MIT’s Open Courseware. They want me to design a hangman game and have given me some preliminary code for importing a wordlist and generating a random word from there. This code on its own returns an error: “can’t have unbuffered text I/O.” Here’s the code:

import random
import string

WORDLIST_FILENAME = "words.txt"

def load_words():
     print("Loading word list from file...")
     # inFile: file
     inFile = open(WORDLIST_FILENAME, 'r', 0)
     # line: string
     line = inFile.readline()
     # wordlist: list of strings
     wordlist = string.split(line)
     print("  ", len(wordlist), "words loaded.")
     return wordlist

def choose_word(wordlist):
     return random.choice(wordlist)

The MIT course does not use Python 3.0, which I am using, so there may be a problem there; as you can see I’ve already updated “print” from a declaration to a function for compatibility with Python 3.0.

Answer 1

This error is thrown because you are trying to read a text file with buffering switched off (the third parameter set to 0):

inFile = open(WORDLIST_FILENAME, 'r', 0)

Replace the above line with

inFile = open(WORDLIST_FILENAME, 'r')

and it should work.

From the python docs:

buffering is an optional integer used to set the buffering policy.
Pass 0 to switch buffering off (only allowed in binary mode), 1 to
select line buffering (only usable in text mode), and an integer > 1
to indicate the size of a fixed-size chunk buffer.