Question

Write a program that simulates a Magic 8 Ball, which is a fortune-telling toy that displays a random response to a yes or no question. In the student sample programs for this book, you will find a text file named 8_ball_responses.txt. The file contains 12 responses, such as “I don’t think so”, “Yes, of course!”, “I’m not sure”, and so forth. The program should read the responses from the file into a list. It should prompt the user to ask a question, then display one of the responses, randomly selected from the list. The program should repeat until the user is ready to quit.

use the template below:

def ___ function:

# open a file

#__ _ _ _ _

#close file

___( )

Contents of 8_ball_responses.txt:

Yes, of course!
Without a doubt, yes.
You can count on it.
For sure!
Ask me later.
Iím not sure.
I canít tell you right now.
Iíll tell you after my nap.
No way!
I donít think so.
Without a doubt, no.
The answer is clearly NO.

Answer 1

Here is the python code with comments:

# import the random module so that we can use the choice function
import random
# The function to get the list of responses from the file
def function():
    stream = open('8_ball_responses.txt', 'rt')
    # we delimit the responses with \n
    listofresponses = stream.read().split('\n')
    # now close the stream
    stream.close()
    return listofresponses

listofresponses = function()
# You can uncomment the below 2 lines to see the list of responses
# for i in listofresponses:
#     print(i)

while True:
    print('Ask a the magic ball a question (press -1 to exit) :')
    # convert the input to a string
    userinput = str(input())
    # if the input is -1 then break
    if(userinput == '-1'):
        break
    # use random.choice to randomly pick a list element
    print('The magic ball says: ' + random.choice(listofresponses))

Here is code image to understand the indentation:

Here is the output: