如何在已分配了随机数的列表中打印单词？

Question

I was wondering if anyone could help me with this problem. In my piece of code that I am working on, I am creating a game upon which the user guesses a word from the list imported from a text file in python 3.3. I choose a random word from the list eg

words = random.randint(0,len(wordlist))

I have successfully, got the program working, however when the user gets the word wrong, it prints the random number its assigned to not the word from the list. for example

else:
    print("No, the answer was",words)

I was wondering how to get to print the word from the list not the random number?

Answer 1

Don't use a random number at all. Use the random.choice() function instead:

words = random.choice(wordlist)

random.choice() picks a random item from the list.

Your use of random.randint() has two problems:

1. You now need to always use wordlist[words] each time you want the word; you are never really interested in random integer, so there is no point in storing that. But

    words = wordlist[random.randint(0, len(wordlist))] 

   is rather more verbose than the random.choice() alternative.

2. random.randint() picks a number between the start and stop values, inclusive . That means you can end up picking exactly len(wordlist) , but there is no such index in your wordlist list; you'd get an IndexError . You need to use random.randint(0, len(wordlist)) - 1 , really, or perhaps random.randrange(len(wordlist)) instead.

   But again, random.choice() is just easier.