Need Some Quick help Please!

Hey guys, I was needing some help on a portion of a program I am writing for my cs class. We are designing a hangman game. I have a lot of my functions built already and pretty much have it all undercontrol, but one thing. Before I say anything else, no I do not expect anyone to write this whole program for me, but I do need help on this one function. I need to write a function that returns a random word out of a file. I have tried using rand and srand, but can't figure out how to do this. I have my file built already with 8 words in it, however I just can't figure out how to generate a function that will pull one of these words out randomly. I would really appreciate if anyone could shed some light on this and help me figure this out. Thanks!!

JT

If you read each word into an array, you can call a random integer, set it to a variable (for example, x) and call strListOfWords[x] or something.

Code:

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string RandomWord(string fileContents)
{
    string[] words = fileContents.Split(" ");
    Random rand = new Random(DateTime.Now.Milliseconds);
    return words[rand.Next(0, words.GetUpperBound(0))];
}

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Thanks fellas. I really appreciate your input. The only thing with arrays is that we haven't even studied them in class and I have no clue how to use them. Pengate, that looks great, I will try that, but I am a little confussed, it looks a little different. Like, what would go in the parentheses where is says "string filecontents"?? I appologise for my stupidity in c++ but I really just don't get this stuff very well, I really have to work at it. I do appreciate you all giving me some help though. Any more help is well appreciated as well. I need all the help I can get. Thanks!!

Quote:

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I appologise for my stupidity in c++

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Are you using C++, or C#? The two are completely different.

Between the parentheses after the method name are the function arguments. These are parameters that you pass to the function that the function can use.

I am using c++, sorry!

That's OK... Send a private message to Hack and ask him to move this thread to the C++ forum :)

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the C++ standard library to be able to help you do it in that language, but we have some C++ experts who will :)

OK, how good this is I'm not sure, but it might get you started.

Code:

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#include <cstdlib>
#include <ctime>
#include <sstream>
#include <string>
#include <vector>

using namespace std;

string RandomWord (string fileContents)
{
    string buffer;
    stringstream stream(fileContents);
    vector<string> tokens;

    while (stream >> buffer)
    {
        tokens.push_back(buffer);
    }
   
    srand(time(NULL));
    return tokens[rand() % (tokens.size() - 1)];
}

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Bear in mind that you shouldn't take anything I say about C++ as gospel :D

Thanks man!

JT

I just simply posted this thread in the c++ forum.

JT