Arrays--part 3.

To create an array:
words = ["horse", "dog", "cow"]
creates a list with 3 elements--you can reference these elements singly as words[0], words[1],
and words[2].
so, for example:
for i in range(3):
       print words[i]
would print out the words in this list. If you want to add a 4th word, "heffalump", you can do
words.append("heffalump")
and heffalump becomes words[3], so there are now 4 words in the list.
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A more flexible way of having a list in your program is to create on in your Python IDLE GUI:
horse
dog
pig
heffalump
woozle
etc   one word per line--call this, say, mywords.txt (it's NOT a Python program, but a data set).
Then to read in the words:

words = []                                                   this creates an initial empty list
numwds = 0                                      we'll keep track of how many words there are
file = open('mywords.txt')                this opens the data file for reading
for line in file:                                            a variation on a for loop
      words.append(line)                             adds the word to the list
      numwds = numwds + 1                      keeps track of how many words we have so far

We can then do
for j in range(numwds):
        print words[j]                                   to print out all the words
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If you want to write the words to another file:

outfile = open('copy.txt','w')                opens the file for writing
for j in range(numwds):
       outfile.write(words[j])
outfile.close()                                              closes the file

---------------
what also works for input is

file = open('mywords.txt','r')
for line in file.readlines():
        words.append(line)
        numwds = numwds + 1

there are also other variations
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Creating nonsense sentences, poetry, etc. (note the blank after each word so they don't run together)
arts=["a ", "the ", "one "]
adjs=["green ", "fuzzy ", "purple ", "bloated "]
nouns = ["boy ","cow ", "bicycle ", "fish "]
verbs=["ran over ", "ate ", "saw ", "was chased by "]
then using randon.randrange, pick out an article, an adjective, a noun, a verb, an article adjective, and noun.
you can have
sentence=arts[random.randrange(3)] + adjs[random.randrange(4)] + nouns[random.randrange(4)]+\
       verbs[random.randrange(4)] + arts[random.randrange(3)] + adjs[random.randrange(4)] +\
   nouns[random.randrange(4)]

and then print sentence works. note that the backslashes let you continue this long statement on the next
line. For poetry, you might have several sets of nouns--and have sentence1 pick its final noun from nouns2,
sentence2 picks its final noun from nouns3. nouns2 and nouns3 would be arrays of nouns that rhyme--e.g.
nouns2=["fool ", "school ", "mule "] and nouns3=["pule ", "yule ", "ghoul "] etc.
also--for amusement, google "computer poetry", "computer haiku", "computer sentences", and also, for
a contrast google "ginsburg + howl" to see human poetry that doesn't sound all that different from what you
might generate.