Random word generator- Python

Question

So i'm basically working on a project where the computer takes a word from a list of words and jumbles it up for the user. there's only one problem: I don't want to keep having to write tons of words in the list, so i'm wondering if there's a way to import a ton of random words so even I don't know what it is, and then I could enjoy the game too? This is the coding of the whole program, it only has 6 words that i put in:

import random

WORDS = ("python", "jumble", "easy", "difficult", "answer",  "xylophone")
word = random.choice(WORDS)
correct = word
jumble = ""
while word:
    position = random.randrange(len(word))
    jumble += word[position]
    word = word[:position] + word[(position + 1):]
print(
"""
      Welcome to WORD JUMBLE!!!

      Unscramble the leters to make a word.
      (press the enter key at prompt to quit)
      """
      )
print("The jumble is:", jumble)
guess = input("Your guess: ")
while guess != correct and guess != "":
    print("Sorry, that's not it")
    guess = input("Your guess: ")
if guess == correct:
    print("That's it, you guessed it!\n")
print("Thanks for playing")

input("\n\nPress the enter key to exit")

Answer 1

Reading a local word list

If you're doing this repeatedly, I would download it locally and pull from the local file. *nix users can use /usr/share/dict/words.

Example:

word_file = "/usr/share/dict/words"
WORDS = open(word_file).read().splitlines()

Pulling from a remote dictionary

If you want to pull from a remote dictionary, here are a couple of ways. The requests library makes this really easy (you'll have to pip install requests):

import requests

word_site = "https://www.mit.edu/~ecprice/wordlist.10000"

response = requests.get(word_site)
WORDS = response.content.splitlines()

Alternatively, you can use the built in urllib2.

import urllib2

word_site = "https://www.mit.edu/~ecprice/wordlist.10000"

response = urllib2.urlopen(word_site)
txt = response.read()
WORDS = txt.splitlines()

Answer 2

Solution for Python 3

For Python3 the following code grabs the word list from the web and returns a list. Answer based on accepted answer above by Kyle Kelley.

import urllib.request

word_url = "http://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/dict/words?view=co&content-type=text/plain"
response = urllib.request.urlopen(word_url)
long_txt = response.read().decode()
words = long_txt.splitlines()

Output:

>>> words
['a', 'AAA', 'AAAS', 'aardvark', 'Aarhus', 'Aaron', 'ABA', 'Ababa',
 'aback', 'abacus', 'abalone', 'abandon', 'abase', 'abash', 'abate',
 'abbas', 'abbe', 'abbey', 'abbot', 'Abbott', 'abbreviate', ... ]

And to generate (because it was my objective) a list of 1) upper case only words, 2) only "name like" words, and 3) a sort-of-realistic-but-fun sounding random name:

import random
upper_words = [word for word in words if word[0].isupper()]
name_words  = [word for word in upper_words if not word.isupper()]
rand_name   = ' '.join([name_words[random.randint(0, len(name_words))] for i in range(2)])

And some random names:

>>> for n in range(10):
        ' '.join([name_words[random.randint(0,len(name_words))] for i in range(2)])

    'Semiramis Sicilian'
    'Julius Genevieve'
    'Rwanda Cohn'
    'Quito Sutherland'
    'Eocene Wheller'
    'Olav Jove'
    'Weldon Pappas'
    'Vienna Leyden'
    'Io Dave'
    'Schwartz Stromberg'

Answer 3

There is a package random_word could implement this request very conveniently:

 $ pip install random-word

from random_word import RandomWords
r = RandomWords()

# Return a single random word
r.get_random_word()
# Return list of Random words
r.get_random_words()
# Return Word of the day
r.word_of_the_day()

Answer 4

There are a number of dictionary files available online - if you're on linux, a lot of (all?) distros come with an /etc/dictionaries-common/words file, which you can easily parse (words = open('/etc/dictionaries-common/words').readlines(), eg) for use.

Answer 5

get the words online

from urllib.request import Request, urlopen
url="https://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/dict/words?revision=61569&view=co"
req = Request(url, headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})

web_byte = urlopen(req).read()

webpage = web_byte.decode('utf-8')
print(webpage)

Randomizing the first 500 words

from urllib.request import Request, urlopen
import random


url="https://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/dict/words?revision=61569&view=co"
req = Request(url, headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})

web_byte = urlopen(req).read()

webpage = web_byte.decode('utf-8')
first500 = webpage[:500].split("\n")
random.shuffle(first500)
print(first500)

Output

['abnegation', 'able', 'aborning', 'Abigail', 'Abidjan', 'ablaze', 'abolish', 'abbe', 'above', 'abort', 'aberrant', 'aboriginal', 'aborigine', 'Aberdeen', 'Abbott', 'Abernathy', 'aback', 'abate', 'abominate', 'AAA', 'abc', 'abed', 'abhorred', 'abolition', 'ablate', 'abbey', 'abbot', 'Abelson', 'ABA', 'Abner', 'abduct', 'aboard', 'Abo', 'abalone', 'a', 'abhorrent', 'Abelian', 'aardvark', 'Aarhus', 'Abe', 'abjure', 'abeyance', 'Abel', 'abetting', 'abash', 'AAAS', 'abdicate', 'abbreviate', 'abnormal', 'abject', 'abacus', 'abide', 'abominable', 'abode', 'abandon', 'abase', 'Ababa', 'abdominal', 'abet', 'abbas', 'aberrate', 'abdomen', 'abetted', 'abound', 'Aaron', 'abhor', 'ablution', 'abeyant', 'about']

Answer 6

import random
import string

letters = string.ascii_letters
x = "".join(random.sample(letters,5))
print(x)

Above, letters will contain all ASCII letter characters (lowercase & uppercase) like so:

>>> print(letters)
>>> 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

Using random.sample will provide you with a list of the total number of items (characters in this case) from the given object (a string object here) based on the number you want (random.sample(<string>, <# of random parts>).

>>> random.sample(letters, 5)
>>> ['j', 'e', 'u', 'g', 'k']

Finally,

x = "".join(...) will join together the returned list with no spaces because of "". which can be changed to " ". if you want spaces in between each letter.