On 28-Aug-12 04:23, Dharmit Shah wrote:
Hello,
I am trying to do the following :
1) Ask user for the length of the word that he'd like to guess (for
hangman game).
2) Pick a random word from /usr/share/dict/words (which I understand
is not the best choice for hangman).
3) Call a function that would pick a random word to proceed further.
Below is the code for the part I described above :
I'm struggling to understand why you're using recursion here.
It serves no evident purpose for what you're doing, and given a large
dictionary of words, could seriously tank the performance of the
application, quite possibly run it out of resources and crash it altogether.
But since you're using recursion, note that when you make your recursive
call, you're ignoring the return value from that call, so no returned
value ever gets propagated out to the outer layers of recursion.
If the outermost layer took the recursion (length of the chosen word is
wrong), it calls itself and then never takes the branch including the
return statement at all. ("return word" is never executed in that
case). This causes the function to just 'fall off' the end which
implicitly returns None.
HTH
[code]
#!/bin/env python
import random
def pick_random(l, ln): # picks a random word from the list
l of length ln
global mystery
word = random.choice(l)
if word.__len__() != ln:
pick_random(l, ln) # recursion
else:
print "Should return %s" % word # prints the chosen random
word correctly
return word # always
return None, why? :(
if __name__ == "__main__":
ln = raw_input("How long word can you guess (number of alphabets) : ")
ln = int(ln)
l = []
with open("/usr/share/dict/words", "r") as f:
for i in f.readlines():
i = i.split("\n")[0]
if i.isalpha():
l.append(i)
word = pick_random(l, ln)
print word
[/code]
Sample output :
$ python hangman.py
How long word can you guess (number of alphabets) : 6
Should return inarch
None
$
The problem is that the last line "print word" always prints None. I
know I am doing something wrong in the recursion part of the function
"pick_random". Can someone please point what I am missing. Thank you!
Cheers,
Dharmit
--
Steve Willoughby / st...@alchemy.com
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."
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