Thread: randomly choosing from a outside source??

I know my title sounds a little weird sorry. This is what I want to do. I want to randomly pick a word from a txt file. The words are seperated by new lines or "\n" and I want the program to randomly pick one of the many I have included. It is for a hangman style game inside my rpg I am working on. I have no idea how to start this. I am not asking for u to do it for me I just want a shove in the right direction. I will gladly do all the coding myself but I can't figure out how to go about this?? thank you all fot the help.

One option is to create a random number and read the file up to that number, the word that you read next is the random word. This can be touchy if you don't know how many words are in the file though, you may have a situation where you read up to EOF and would have to rewind the file to continue.

There are a number of ways to go about this though.

-Prelude

I sort of understand what you mean. but if i create a random number won't it sometimes end up in the middle of the word?
Could I possibly number the lines? I dunno thanx again.

>but if i create a random number won't it sometimes end up in the middle of the word?
No, you create the random number and then read individual words, each time incrementing a counter. When the counter reaches the random number, you're just before the word you want.

-Prelude