Re^2: Using <> in the presence of @ARGV

Now if you want the arguement to be a random line in dict, than one easy way to go about this is to record the ammount of lines, and read from the file and skip until $. = the random number between 1..LAST_LINE. Because code size is an issue that solution is probably the best for you.

Actually, a slightly more efficient solution is the following gem, slightly adapted from perlfaq5:

open my $fh, "somefile" or die $!;

my $line;
rand($.) < 1 && ($line = $_) while <$fh>;
[download]

This sets $line to a uniform, random line from "somefile" and it has the advantage of only reading through the file once. For that reason (and the fact that the important stuff can be reduced to a one-liner), it's probably more concise than the naïve solution!

blokhead

Comment on Re^2: Using <> in the presence of @ARGV Download Code

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Re^3: Using <> in the presence of @ARGV by sauoq (Abbot) on Oct 04, 2005 at 05:53 UTC
If you need to pick more than one word during a run of this script, then a solution based on Tie::File would probably be better. `use Tie::File; tie my @word, 'Tie::File', '/usr/dict/words' or die $!; print "$word[rand @word]\n" for 1..10;` [download] -sauoq "My two cents aren't worth a dime.";	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Using <> in the presence of @ARGV by EvanCarroll (Chaplain) on Oct 04, 2005 at 02:07 UTC
If memmory isn't an issue, my dict file is only 880kb: `my @file = <$fh>; print $file[int rand $#file];` [download] Evan Carroll www.EvanCarroll.com	[reply] [d/l]