16.3. Making a MadLib Story¶
Let’s use the ranged based loop of a list to create a MadLib program. MadLibs are stories where the “player” is asked to provide some words that are then incorporated into the story in the hopes of creating something amusingly silly.
Our program will start with a story where some placeholder words are in ALL_CAPS. Those are ones we will ask the user to fill in.
It is much easier to start with our story as one big string. But to loop through the words, looking
for the ones in ALL_CAPS, it will be easier to have it stored as a list where each word is an item
in the list. To turn the string into a list, we will use a new string function: split(pattern). You
don’t have to worry about using it on your own, just recognize that it chops up a string into a list
by making cuts everywhere pattern is. So split(" ") breaks up a string at each space.
Code is written to set up the list, add code to loop through the list using a range based loop and print each item from the list. Your output should have the full story, but with only one word appearing on each line.
Add the loop to output each word of the story.
Now let’s identify which words are in ALL_CAPS. To do that, we need to call the isupper() function on each
word. It returns True if the word is all upper case and False if it is not.
Modify your program, so instead of printing each word, you print True or False depending on if it is
ALL_CAPS. Do so by calling isupper() on each list item and printing out the result. Because each
item in the list is a string, you can call isupper on it by doing something like:
storyList[index].isupper(). Your output will look like a long list of FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, TRUE, etc…
Now we are ready to do something special each time we find an all caps word. We want to replace
those with user input. Because user input is slow to test, we will start by just replacing all
of the upper case words with the text "INPUT". If we get that working, it will be one more
simple step to use actual user input instead of "INPUT".
Modify your program to use the storyList[index].isupper() call in the condition of an if.
If isupper() results in True, change storyList[index] "INPUT". (If isupper() results
in False, no change is needed.)
If you get stuck changing the item, look back at the mixed up code problem on the first page of this chapter. It uses an if statement to decide which items to change.
Now you should be ready to actually make your program interactive! This version
is not automatically checked, so make sure to run it and test it by entering
information. This starter code adds two lines that need to go after your code.
They will turn the list back into a string using string.join(list) and print it out.
Don’t worry about remembering join() - just recognize that it does the opposite
of split - it turns a list into a string by joining together the items using the
string as “glue” between each item.
Modify your program so that instead of setting the all caps items to = "INPUT", you set
them to = input("Please enter " + storyList[index]). You may need to change index to
i or something else to match the variable you are using in your loop.