Good morning and welcome to the list,
: Just planning it out in my head so far, like pseudocode. I hope
: to get started soon. I'm just looking to have a little dialog box
: come up, display a random quote of the day, and then hit enter
: and it's gone. Should be a nice, simple way to get started with
: Python.
N.B. Most of the questions and answers here are about the python 2.x
series, so just note that there are some minor differences with
python 3.x.
I would suggest starting with the data/format. I think somebody
else has already remarked that with a few thousand quotations, you
will not have much difficulty loading it all into memory, so here
are some tips on how to approach the problem by creating a CLI
application first, moving onto the GUI parts after you have worked
out the functionality to read a file and produce the quotation.
I don't have the book you are recommending, but here are some things
that I would be thinking about if I were writing a utility which
behaves like the venerable unix game called 'fortune'.
1. Learn how to read line-oriented data from a file [0]. Let's
assume that your first pass at this has only one quotation per
line.
This little functon works much like the 'cat' utility:
import sys
def main(fname):
f = open(fname,'r')
for line in f:
print line.rstrip()
f.close()
main(sys.argv[1]) # python this.py <filename>
Now, put the lines into a list instead of printing them:
def main(fname):
quotations = list()
f = open(fname,'r')
for line in f:
quotations.append( line.rstrip() )
f.close()
return quotations
2. Play with the random module to get your 'pick a quotation at
random' behaviour.
import random
print random.choice(quotations)
3. Experiment with the vagaries of 'print'. It produces a
newline. Learn how to suppress the newline when printing
(even if you don't want to do that this time).
4. Experiment with string handling. Learn how to break a string
into lists. Learn how to make a single string out of the
contents of a list. In short, become familiar with using
split() http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.split
join() http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.join
5. Start thinking about what you would have to change in order to
handle multi-line or formatted quotations. This is where you
can start thinking about treating your data as records rather
than lines, as above.
I suspect that you will have all of the above understood in fairly
short order. At that point, you could make the foray into the
various GUI bits. I will be no help there, as I have never used any
of the GUI toolkits--but this list has many others who should be
able to help here.
I hope the 'Sweet Irene the Disco Queen' flooding in your region was
not too bad, Frank.
-Martin
P.S. Here's a possibly obnoxious tip, assuming the 'fortune' file
format [1] suits your tastes for storing your quotations:
f = open(fname,'r')
quotations = ''.join(f.readlines()).split('%')
[0] http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#file-objects
[1] http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch05s02.html
--
Martin A. Brown
http://linux-ip.net/
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