Simple random name generator in Python

I have a text file containing first and last 'syllables', demarcated with [part1] and [part2]:

[part1]
Ae
Di
Mo
Fam
[part2]
dar
kil
glar
tres

All I want to do is pick a random line, between [part1] and [part2], and t开发者_Go百科hen another random line between [part2] and the end of the file, and concatenate the two together (e.g. "Aedar", "Moglar") to create random names.

However I am unsure how to parse the text file effectively with readline(). Is there a better way than scanning through each line sequentially, and storing all of them in a list from whence I can pick a random element?

---

Serialize (pickle) a dictionary to a file instead.

Example:

# create the dict and save it to a file
d={
'part1':[
    'Ae',
    'Di',
    'Mo',
    'Fam',],
'part2':[
    'dar',
    'kil',
    'glar',
    'tres',],
}

import pickle
f=open('syllables','w')
pickle.dump(d,f)
f.close()


# read the dict back in from the file
f1=open('syllables','r')
sd=pickle.load(f1)
f1.close()

import random
first_part=sd['part1'][random.randint(0,len(sd['part1'])-1)]
second_part=sd['part2'][random.randint(0,len(sd['part2'])-1)]

print '%s%s'%(first_part,second_part)

---

import random
parts = {}

with open('parts.txt', 'r') as f:
    currentList = []
    for line in f.readlines():
        line = line.strip()
        if line.startswith('[') and line.endswith(']'):
            currentList = []
            parts[line[1:-1]] = currentList
        else:
            currentList.append(line.strip())


for i in xrange(10):    
    print ''.join(random.choice(parts[partName]) for partName in sorted(parts))

returns (randomly):

Aekil
Didar
Mokil
Mokil
Moglar
Moglar
Diglar
Famdar
Famdar
Modar

---

You'll have to read through the entire file at some point, unless you know beforehand how many prefixes and suffixes there are. Since I assume you don't, or that it can change and you don't want to maintain a number for storing that, you'll have to read through the file, and readline() is a good way of doing that.

However, you can preprocess your text file so that it uses another format, such as a pickle file. In other words, read the text file into a dictionary, and pickle that dictionary. The dictionary might look something like this:

dic = {'prefixes': ['Ae' ,'di', ...], 'suffixes': ['dar', 'kil', ...]}

From the lenght of the arrays you can then determine what the maximum random number is. It should be more efficient than reading an entire file line-for-line each time. And if not, at least it's a bit more elegant solution.

---

Modified @eumiro's script:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import fileinput
import random
import re
from collections import defaultdict

partname = ''
parts = defaultdict(list)
for line in fileinput.input():
    line = line.rstrip()
    if line.startswith('[') and re.match(r'\[part\d+\]', line):
        partname = line
    else:
        parts[partname].append(line)

parts_list = list(map(parts.get, sorted(parts)))
for _ in range(10):
    print(''.join(map(random.choice, parts_list)))

Output

Famglar
Famkil
Didar
Ditres
Aedar
Famglar
Ditres
Famtres
Ditres
Modar

---

I once found a unique, pseudo name generator I used quite often at a website called domainhole, but then security warnings and alerts popped every time I tried to visit the site. So I wrote a script to do the same thing it was doing.

import random

vowels = [97,101,105,111,117]
consonants = [98,99,100,102,103,104,106,107,108,109,110,112,113,114,115,116,118,119,120,121,122]

def get_character(seed):
    match seed:
        case 'L':
            return chr(random.randint(97,122))
        case 'C':
            return chr(consonants[random.randint(0,len(consonants)-1)])
        case 'V':
            return chr(vowels[random.randint(0,len(vowels)-1)])
        case _:
            return -1

# enter custom values here: C for consonants, V for vowels, and L for all letters
pseudonym_array = ['C','L','V','L']
pseudonym = ''
for i in range(len(pseudonym_array)):
    pseudonym += get_character(pseudonym_array[i])
print(pseudonym)