Where To Put str.strip

Question

I wrote a code for a computer generated madlibs:

from random import randrange
print 'Welcome to Madlibs!'
def choose():
    f = open('/usr/share/dict/words')
    content = f.readlines()
    return content[randrange(len (content))]
word = choose()
wordone = choose()
wordtwo = choose()
print 'there was a boy called', word, 'that had a', wordone, 'as a', wordtwo

There's a newline after the variable words because in the file they include a newline after each word. I know the proper command to remove the newline would be str.strip, but I'm not sure where to put it.

Answer 1

You put .strip() when you know you can trim off characters from the start and end of a string. In this case you'd put it while reading line by line.

def choose():
    with open('/usr/share/dict/words') as f:
        content = [line.strip() for line in f]

Answer 2

Even though you have to read the entire file, you don't necessary have to read it into memory to pick a set of random words, eg:

import heapq
import random

with open('yourfile') as fin:
    # Make generator that has lines stripped of newlines/whitespace from end of words
    stripped_lines = (line.rstrip() for line in fin)
    # Get three random words by taking one with largest random number
    word1, word2, word3 = heapq.nlargest(3, stripped_lines, key=lambda L: random.random())
    print 'There was a boy called {} that had a {} as a {}'.format(word1, word2, word3)