Contents:

• Overview
• Collaboration Policy
• Detailed Requirements
• Picking the Secret
• An Example
• Submitting Your Assignment
• Grading Standards
• Extra Credit

Overview

Your goal is to provide an implementation of the classic game Hangman, as outlined in Exercise 5.36 on page 201 of the text. More detailed requirements are given below.

Collaboration Policy

For this assignment, you are allowed to work with one other student if you wish (in fact, we suggest that you do so). If any student wishes to have a partner but has not been able to locate one, please let the instructor know so that we can match up partners.

Please make sure you adhere to the policies on academic integrity in this regard.

Detailed Requirements

The text gives an overview of the game. Here we make the following requirements explicit:

• Each individual round should be managed using a function playHangman(secret). We will describe how to pick random secrets later in this document.


• The secret may include a mix of lower and uppercase letters, as well as spaces and other punctuations. The player is only responsible for guessing the alphabetic characters (you may use the isalpha method of the string class to differentiate).

  When displaying the current puzzle, you should show all non-alphabetic characters in their original form, and you should show any of the previously-guessed letters in their original case. All unguessed letters should be replaced by the undescrore character (_).

  For example, here is an example of a partially completed puzzle.
  __e__to_e: The Le_e__ o_ Ta__a_, Lo__ o_ the A_e_
  
  (any guesses???)



• A round proceeds by having the player make a series of guesses, with each guess being a single alphabet character. The user should be allowed to enter guesses in lowercase or uppercase, yet receive credit for a match even if the puzzle uses the character in the opposite case.

  Before each of the player's guesses, display the following information to the player:

  • An alphabetical list of all characters that have already been guessed (including both correct guesses and misses).
  • The number of remaining mistakes that will be allowed (initially 7).
  • Display the current puzzle (format described below). in place of any unknown alphabetic characters.

  If the user guesses a letter that was previously guessed, do not count this against their score. Instead, given an appropriate error message and let them make a new guess.

  After a new letter is guessed, the user should either be informed that it is not in the puzzle, or the puzzle should be re-displayed with all occurrences of the guessed character uncovered.



• When a round is complete, either because the user completes the puzzle or has exhausted the allowable number of misses, make sure to print an appropriate message (including the answer to the puzzle).


• Your program should offer the user the chance to play more than one round of the game.

You may safely assume that the underscore character (_) does not appear in any of the secrets, and that each secret has at least one alphabetic character.

Picking the Secret

When originally developing your program, it will probably help for you to debug your software while relying on a known answer. That way you will be able to monitor whether the software behaves as is expected.

For the final product, we want a user to play the game without knowing the secret in advance. We offer the following function that allows the software to pick a secret uniformly at random from an underlying file of possibilities (assumed to have one entry per line).

We also offer a data file that contains the titles of over 1800 movies. We have placed the file on turing, or you may download it (movies.txt), if working on your own machine.

from random import randrange

def pickSecret(filename='/Public/goldwasser/150/programs/hangman/movies.txt'):
  secret = ''
  linenum = 0
  for word in file(filename):
    linenum += 1
    if randrange(0,linenum)==0:
       secret = word.strip()
  return secret

Note: the default filename used here is presuming that you want the movie list and that you are working on turing. You can provide some other filename by sending an explicit parameter.

An Example

Submitting Your Assignment

You should create a new file, hangman.py, that contains all of the code. This file must be submitted electronically.

You should also submit a separate 'readme' text file, as outlined in the general webpage on programming assignments. For this assignment, please explain any interesting design decisions that you made about the user interface or about your implementation techniques. If you worked as a pair, please make this clear and briefly describe the contributions of each person in the effort.

Please see details regarding the submission process from the general programming web page, as well as a discussion of the late policy.

Grading Standards

The assignment is worth 10 points.

Extra Credit

Use a graphical interface to animate a game in progress, rather than relying solely on the text-based interface.