Combine words from different .txt files to create a new big text

pixelman

Hi, new to DrawBot.
I am looking for a solutions for a master student at KASK.be.
She want to combine 'words' from 3(or more) different .txt files.
To create a new combined text.
Every .txt file contains a big story in unformatted text.

So the text starts with the first word of text 1
…then the second word is the first word of text 2
…the third word is the first word of text 3
This loop should go on until the 3 text files are finished.

Anyone who could give us a suggestion to start with?
Thanks
Harold.

gferreira

hello @pixelman,

here’s a basic example showing how to make a new text by ‘rotating’ through the words in multiple input texts. it can handle texts with different amounts of words.

txt1 = 'lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit'
txt2 = 'donec dignissim tortor eget rhoncus hendrerit'
txt3 = 'pellentesque at odio a dolor egestas molestie et non justo'

# break each text into words
words1 = txt1.split()
words2 = txt2.split()
words3 = txt3.split()

# get the biggest amount of words
wordCount = max(len(words1), len(words2), len(words3))

# make an empty list to collect the combined words
resultWords = []

# count until the biggest amount of words
for i in range(wordCount):
    # for each list of words
    for words in [words1, words2, words3]:
        # if the current index is smaller than the amount of words
        if i < len(words):
            # add the word at the current index to the list
            resultWords.append(words[i])

# join combined words into a string
result = ' '.join(resultWords)

print(result)

‘real’ text usually includes punctuation, capital letters, etc. which makes the problem harder / more fun. you’ll need to think about how to handle those.

succes!

ps. and this is how you read a text file into a string:

with open('example.txt', 'r', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    txt1 = f.read()

pixelman

Hey gferreira, thankx we try to test it out tomorrow… many thanks!