random::wordlist(3pm)
NAME
Data::Random::WordList - Perl module to get random words from a word
list
SYNOPSIS
use Data::Random::WordList; my $wl = new Data::Random::WordList( wordlist => '/usr/share/dict/words' ); my @rand_words = $wl->get_words(10); $wl->close();
DESCRIPTION
Data::Random::WordList is a module that manages a file containing a
list of words.
The module expects each line of the word list file to contain only one
word. It could thus be easily used to select random lines from a file,
but for coherency's sake, I'll keep referring to each line as a word.
The module uses a persistent filehandle so that there isn't a lot of
overhead every time you want to fetch a list of random words. However,
it's much more efficient to grab multiple words at a time than it is to
fetch one word at a time multiple times.
The module also refrains from reading the whole file into memory, so it
can be safer to use with larger files.
METHODS
new()
Returns a reference to a new Data::Random::WordList object. Use the
"wordlist" param to initialize the object:
- o wordlist - the path to the wordlist file. If a path isn't sup
- plied, the wordlist distributed with this module is used.
- get_words([NUM])
- NUM contains the number of words you want from the wordlist. NUM
defaults to 1 if it's not specified. get_words() dies if NUM is greater than the number of words in the wordlist. This function
returns an array or an array reference depending on the context in
which it's called. - close()
- Closes the filehandle associated with the word list. It's good practice to do this every time you're done with the word list.
VERSION
0.05
AUTHOR
Adekunle Olonoh, koolade@users.sourceforge.net
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2000 Adekunle Olonoh. All rights reserved. This program
is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
same terms as Perl itself.
SEE ALSO
- Data::Random