Question

Writing a hangman program in python and I’ve come across a problem when passing in a file that has multi word strings and single word strings.

FILE:

hello brown fox

dog

cat

water

jump

#initialize list
wordList = []
# get and open file
getFile = raw_input("Enter file name: ")
filename = open(getFile, "r")

def readWords(filename):
    for line in filename:
        # split any multi word line
        line.split()
        # add line to wordList
        wordList.append(line)

Yet the out put for wordList still reads:

wordList = ['hello brown fox\n', 'dog\n', 'cat\n', 'water\n', 'jump\n']

I am trying to make it so that ‘hello brown fox’ appears as 3 separate strings.

Answer 1

the problem you’re having is that you’re splitting but not saving the splitted line:

>>> a = "hello brown fox"
>>> a.split()
['hello', 'brown', 'fox']
>>> a
'hello brown fox'
>>> 

so:

wordList.extend(line.split())

should do the trick for you