On 15 Sep 2006 19:17:25 -0700, gry@ll.mit.edu <gry@ll.mit.edu> wrote: > I want a function (or callable something) that returns a random > word meeting a criterion. I can do it like: > > def random_richer_word(word): > '''find a word having a superset of the letters of "word"''' > if len(set(word) == 26): raise WordTooRichException, word > while True: > w = random.choice(words) > if set(w) - set(word): # w has letters not present in word > return w > > This seems like a perfect application for generators or iterators, > but I can't quite see how. Any suggestions?
Simply change the return to yield. The function will return a generator which will iterate over each new word found. I would fix it up a bit more than that, however. For example, create the set for word's letters before the loop, and keep a set of previously yielded words, so you dont use the same one twice. Alternatively, maybe you meant that you still want to get a single word, but you want to iterate until its done, so its non-blocking in nature. In that case, you might still yield, but add an else block to yield None, and keep iterating until it yields something evaluating true. In either case I would be pre-computing that set of subset letters. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
