Tip of the day generator.

[Joseph king]

Hey i was wondering if any one would know if there was a way to have
python randomly read form a file or would you ahve to know the byte
postion and somehow randomize splicing the file so the sentence you
want show's up.

i.e have a file with a lot of tips and useless facts and then have
python randomly read one sentence when the code is run and print at
any time you would want it to.

 

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Hey i was wondering if any one would know if there was a way to have
python randomly read form a file or would you ahve to know the byte
postion and somehow randomize splicing the file so the sentence you
want show's up.

i.e have a file with a lot of tips and useless facts and then have
python randomly read one sentence when the code is run and print at
any time you would want it to.

import random
print random.choice(open("quotes").readlines())

Diez

 

[Neil Cerutti]

Hey i was wondering if any one would know if there was a way to
have python randomly read form a file or would you ahve to know
the byte postion and somehow randomize splicing the file so the
sentence you want show's up.

i.e have a file with a lot of tips and useless facts and then
have python randomly read one sentence when the code is run and
print at any time you would want it to.

I use a Python application sort of like that to install the
random quotes in my sig. It reads a text file containing one
quote per line, selects a random one, and updates my signature
file with a quote half the time.

Originally it ran as a daemon and updated my sig every 60
seconds, but it was a pain to remember to stop and start it. Now
I just have the program run automatically whenever I edit a post.

Incidentally, you don't want to the the C++ program that this
replaced.

import textwrap
import random
import os

print "Sigswap v0.4"

homedir = os.getenv("HOME")
homedir = '/'.join(homedir.split('\\'))
sigpath = homedir + '/my.sig'

quotepath = homedir + '/quotes.txt'
qfile = file(quotepath)
quotelist = []
for quote in qfile:
quotelist.append(quote)
qfile.close()
sigfile = file(sigpath, "w")
sigfile.write("-- \n")
sigfile.write("Neil Cerutti\n")
random.seed()
if random.choice([True, False]):
quote = random.choice(quotelist)
for line in textwrap.wrap(quote, 78):
sigfile.write(line)
sigfile.write('\n')
sigfile.close()

 

[Jason]

Hey i was wondering if any one would know if there was a way to have
python randomly read form a file or would you ahve to know the byte
postion and somehow randomize splicing the file so the sentence you
want show's up.

i.e have a file with a lot of tips and useless facts and then have
python randomly read one sentence when the code is run and print at
any time you would want it to.

Python can handle it just fine. You probably want to create a text
file with a standard delimiter between quotes, perhaps a text line
with three to five equal signs ('==='). Open the file object [1],
read in all the data [2], split the data into a list by the delimiter
[3], then choose a random string from the list [4]. For example:
This is a single sentence that repels vikings.
This is a single sentence that repels vikings.
This is a crazy, multi-line quote! It's
so very, very crazy!
-Personal Attribution


Obviously, you might need to deal with leading and trailing whitespace
[5].

If you are restricted to a series of paragraphs in the text file,
you'll need to split the string at the sentence separating
punctuation. There's a lot of ways that punctuation can work in
English, so splitting on periods, exclamation points, and question
marks may not work if you have elipses (...) in the document. You'll
probably need to split using a regular expression [6].

If you are reading a formatted file of some sort (such as XML, HTML,
badly-formatted HTML, Word documents, PDFs, etc), you'll need to
figure out how to read the document in Python. While Python has XML
support and some HTML support [7], you'll probably want Beautiful Soup
[8] to read badly formatted HTML. Word documents are much trickier,
and it's usually easiest to use Microsoft Word to save to a plain text
format.

Hope this helps you out!

--Jason

[1] http://docs.python.org/lib/built-in-funcs.html
[2] http://docs.python.org/lib/bltin-file-objects.html
[3] http://docs.python.org/lib/string-methods.html
[4] http://docs.python.org/lib/module-random.html
[5] http://docs.python.org/lib/string-methods.html
[6] http://docs.python.org/lib/node46.html
[7] http://docs.python.org/lib/markup.html
[8] http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

 

[Neil Cerutti]

import textwrap
import random
import os

print "Sigswap v0.4"
[...]

Yikes!

That program was in dire need of Pythonification. It must have
been written early in my Pythonology.