Simple random name generator in Python

Question

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 then 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?

Answer 1

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)

Answer 2

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