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Pulling a random word or string from a line in a text file in Python

Last Updated : 11 Dec, 2020

File handling in Python is really simple and easy to implement. In order to pull a random word or string from a text file, we will first open the file in read mode and then use the methods in Python’s random module to pick a random word.

There are various ways to perform this operation:

This is the text file we will read from:

Method 1: Using random.choice()

Steps:

Using with function, open the file in read mode. The with function takes care of closing the file automatically.
Read all the text from the file and store in a string
Split the string into words separated by space.
Use random.choice() to pick a word or string.

Python

# Python code to pick a random 
# word from a text file 
import random 
  
# Open the file in read mode 
with open("MyFile.txt", "r") as file: 
    allText = file.read() 
    words = list(map(str, allText.split())) 
  
    # print random string 
    print(random.choice(words)) 

Note: The split() function, by default, splits by white space. If you want any other delimiter like newline character you can specify that as an argument.

Output:

Output for two sample runs

The above can be achieved with just a single line of code like this :

Python

# import required module 
import random 
  
# print random word 
print(random.choice(open("myFile.txt","r").readline().split()))

Method 2: Using random.randint()

Steps:

Open the file in read mode using with function
Store all data from the file in a string and split the string into words.
Count the total number of words.
Use random.randint() to generate a random number between 0 and the word_count.
Print the word at that position.

Python

# using randint() 
import random 
  
# open file 
with open("myFile.txt", "r") as file: 
    data = file.read() 
    words = data.split() 
      
    # Generating a random number for word position 
    word_pos = random.randint(0, len(words)-1) 
    print("Position:", word_pos) 
    print("Word at position:", words[word_pos]) 

Output:

Output for two sample runs

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