Selecting random word with length-criterion. How to decompose?

Question

This is plan of my game I finished(it works). I want to at the beginning add a difficulty level. Easy is six letter word, medium is seven, and hard is eight or more. Where would it go?

Letters = set(string.ascii_lowercase)

def main():

    words = [line.strip() for line in open("E:\wordlist.txt")]
    correct_word = random.choice(words).strip().upper()
    letters = list(correct_word)
    random.shuffle(letters)
    word = ""
    for i in range (len(letters)):
        word += letters[i]
    print("Welcome to my game, solve the puzzle.")

    print("Lets play")

I do believe you try to over complicate a very simple if-elif problem — Itay Moav -Malimovka, Mar 20 '15 at 00:11
What is `Letters` supposed to be, defined in line 1 but never used? Variable names shouldn't contain capitals (see PEP-8). Also, your wordlist file is lowercase but your game is played in uppercase - just keep everything uppercase! — smci, Mar 20 '15 at 02:45
Sure. Guessing you intend to use Letters to both test user input is a valid letter while also track letters not used so far. Just rename it lowercase e.g. `letters_unused`, and make it a class member, not a global. And reinitialize it every game. — smci, Mar 20 '15 at 04:00

smci · Answer 1 · 2015-03-20T04:20:05.677

(In general you will find http://codereview.stackexchange.com more suitable than SO for how-do-I-implement or refactor questions on incomplete code.)

Ok, you first want to prompt user for the difficulty level, convert that to corresponding wordlength, wordlength, then use those in your word-selecting-and-shuffling code. This could all do with a little refactoring, and since you need to pass some data around, I refactored into a class with setup(),play() methods. Also you only want to read in your wordlist once (e.g. in the class __init__() method), not every game.

Note the use of the tuple assignment from dict level_to_wordlength, and the compact while-loop idiom in choose_random_word()

import random
import string

class Hangman(object):

    def __init__(self, wordlist = 'wordlist.txt'):
        self.words = [word.strip() for word in open(wordlist)] # store them uppercase
        #self.level = None
        #self.min_wordlength = None
        #self.max_wordlength = None
        self.correct_word = None
        self.letters_unused = None

    def select_difficulty(self):
        while True:
            level = raw_input("Choose difficulty: E(asy) M(edium) H(ard) : ")
            level = (level or " ")[0].upper()
            if level in 'EMH':
                return level
            print "Error: bad level"
        # or store it in self.level if needed

    def choose_random_word(self, min_wordlength, max_wordlength):
        word = ''
        while not( min_wordlength <= len(word) <= max_wordlength ): # note the idiom
            word = random.choice(self.words)
        self.correct_word = word

    def setup(self):
        level = self.select_difficulty()  # or store it in self.level if needed

        # Convert level to wordlength constraints...  we could use an if..elif ladder for simplicity,
        # but here's a neat idiomatic method using tuple assignment from a dict.
        level_to_wordlength =  {'E': (6,6), 'M': (7,7), 'H': (8,999)}
        min_wordlength, max_wordlength = level_to_wordlength[level]

        self.choose_random_word(min_wordlength, max_wordlength)

        self.letters_unused = set(string.ascii_uppercase)

    def play(self):
        letters = list(self.correct_word)
        random.shuffle(letters)
        word = ''.join(letters)

        print("Welcome to my game, solve the puzzle.")
        print("Let's play")
        # ... you do the rest ...

if __name__ == '__main__':

    game = Hangman()
    game.setup()
    game.play()

Selecting random word with length-criterion. How to decompose?

1 Answers1