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File handling in Python is really simple and easy to implement. In order to pull a random word or string from a text file, we will first open the file in read mode and then use the methods in Python’s random module to pick a random word.
There are various ways to perform this operation:
This is the text file we will read from:
Method 1: Using random.choice()
Steps:
- Using with function, open the file in read mode. The with function takes care of closing the file automatically.
- Read all the text from the file and store in a string
- Split the string into words separated by space.
- Use random.choice() to pick a word or string.
Python
# Python code to pick a random
# word from a text file
import random
# Open the file in read mode
with open("MyFile.txt", "r") as file:
allText = file.read()
words = list(map(str, allText.split()))
# print random string
print(random.choice(words))
Note: The split() function, by default, splits by white space. If you want any other delimiter like newline character you can specify that as an argument.
Output:
Output for two sample runs
The above can be achieved with just a single line of code like this :
Python
# import required module
import random
# print random word
print(random.choice(open("myFile.txt","r").readline().split()))
Method 2: Using random.randint()
Steps:
- Open the file in read mode using with function
- Store all data from the file in a string and split the string into words.
- Count the total number of words.
- Use random.randint() to generate a random number between 0 and the word_count.
- Print the word at that position.
Python
# using randint()
import random
# open file
with open("myFile.txt", "r") as file:
data = file.read()
words = data.split()
# Generating a random number for word position
word_pos = random.randint(0, len(words)-1)
print("Position:", word_pos)
print("Word at position:", words[word_pos])
Output:
Output for two sample runs
Last Updated : 11 Dec, 2020
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