Lists and Dictionaries, Oh My

This week’s assignment for Reading and Writing Electronic Text required that we write a Python program that uses one or more of the following data structures: sets, lists, and dictionaries. The program that I wrote takes the lines of a text and removes most of the punctuation, then randomly selects eight lines to create a poem.

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#Kim Ash
#creates list of lines and randomly sample it
#uses dictionary to remove punctuation from poem
 
import sys
import random
 
linelist = list()
punctuation = {'.': '\n', ', ': ' ', '; ': '\n', '"': '', '--': '--\n', '(': ' ', ')': '', '_': ''}
 
for line in sys.stdin:
	line = line.strip()
	if len(line) > 0:
		for key in punctuation.keys():
			line = line.replace(key, punctuation[key])
		linelist.append(line)
 
selection = random.sample(linelist, 8)
 
for item in selection:
	print item

I applied my program to the text of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” The language of “Masque” is a bit more poetic–possibly because it hasn’t been translated from another language–so I like its results better. The first poem is from “Masque”:

The Masque of the Red Death
unimpeded he passed within a yard of the prince's person
and while
step made closer approach to the speaker
  But from a certain nameless
after them as they depart
  And now again the music swells and the
circuit of the face and the hour was to be stricken there came from
casements
  The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange--
the fifth
hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his
the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep

This one is also from “Masque”:

and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies there came yet another
face of the victim were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid
that of the last of the gay
  And the flames of the tripods expired

tangible form

despair a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the
the sound
and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions
and
And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over
circuit of the face and the hour was to be stricken there came from

This last poem is from “Metamorphosis”:

come into his room with her violin as no-one appreciated her
turned his head his father merely stamped his foot all the harder

cold she would stay at the window breathing deeply for a little
all but he soon had to admit that the women going to and fro their
and held particularly good promise for the future
  The greatest
room being carefully shut had woken him
  The light from the
father came into the living room before he went into the kitchen,
curious to learn what they would say when they caught sight of him

To see other work from this class, check out my RWET Github Repo.