| When I was a wee lad, we used to play at Mad Libs for hours and hours. This was before computers, mind you, before televisions or radio or even paper! No, scratch that, we had paper. Anyway, point is we only had Mad Libs to play, and we loved it! And now you must play! |
We’ll write a program called mad.py that will read a file given as a positional argument and find all the placeholders noted in angle brackets like <verb> or <adjective>. For each placeholder, we’ll prompt the user for the part of speech being requested like "Give me a verb" and "Give me an adjective." (Notice that you’ll need to use the correct article just as in "Crow’s Nest.") Each value from the user will then replace the placeholder in the text, so if the user says "drive" for "verb," then <verb> in the text will be replace with drive. When all the placeholders have been replaced with inputs from the user, print out the new text.
There is a 17_mad_libs/inputs directory with some sample files you can use, but I encourage you to create your own. For instance, here is a version of the "fox" text:
$ cat inputs/fox.txt The quick <adjective> <noun> jumps <preposition> the lazy <noun>.
When the program is run with this file as the input, it will ask for each of the placeholders and then print the silliness:
$ ./mad.py inputs/fox.txt Give me an adjective: surly Give me a noun: car Give me a preposition: under Give me a noun: bicycle The quick surly car jumps under the lazy bicycle.