'''
Created on Jan 21, 2011

Modified on Feb 22, 2012, remove use
of dictionaries and read file by lines
rather than by words --- this will
make it easier to use non-words, i.e.,
lines like "Animal Farm" or "Jackson Pollock" 
if user wants to guess books or artists or ... 

Modified on October 7, 2012, now a source for copying
code rather than calling code in this module

@author: ola
'''
import random

def load_lines(filename):
    """
    read words from specified file and return a list of
    strings, each string is one line of the file
    """
    lines = []
    f = open(filename)
    for line in f.readlines():
        line = line.strip()
        lines.append(line)
    return lines
    
    
def get_words(filename, wordlength = 5):
    """
    returns a list of words having a specified length from
    the file whose name is filename.
    default length is 5 (if parameter not specified)
    """
    lines = load_lines(filename)
    wlist = [w for w in lines if len(w) == wordlength]
    return wlist

def user():
    print "what's the word length?>",
    n = int(raw_input())
    words = get_words("lowerwords.txt",n)
    print "read %d words whose length is %d" % (len(words),n)
    one = random.choice(words)
    print "choosing at random>",one
    if len(words) < 30:
        for i,w in enumerate(words):
            print i,"\t",w

if __name__ == "__main__":
    user()