Question

I’m working on a simple Python game where the computer tries to guess a number you think of. Every time it guesses the right answer, it saves the answer to a txt file. When the program is run again, it will guess the old answers first (if they’re in the range the user specifies).

try:
   f = open("OldGuesses.txt", "a")
   r = open("OldGuesses.txt", "r")
except IOError as e:
   f = open("OldGuesses.txt", "w")
   r = open("OldGuesses.txt", "r")

data = r.read()
number5 = random.choice(data)
print number5

When I run that to pull the old answers, it grabs one item. Like say I have the numbers 200, 1242, and 1343, along with spaces to tell them apart, it will either pick a space, or a single digit. Any idea how to grab the full number (like 200) and/ or avoid picking spaces?

Answer 1

The r.read() call reads the entire contents of r and returns it as a single string. What you can do is use a list comprehension in combination with r.readlines(), like this:

data = [int(x) for x in r.readlines()]

which breaks up the file into lines and converts each line to an integer.