Return a random set of words from system dictionary that meet specific criteria

I’d like to help my young child broaden his vocabulary. The plan is to parse the dictionary (in this case, MacOS), append the words to a list and if those list items meets specific criteria they are added to another list… perhaps a little messier than it needs to be!

I’d like to see just five randomly chosen words be printed. I’ve managed most of it already but get an error when trying to pick a random item to show…

IndexError: list index out of range

And the code thus far…

import random


word_file = "/usr/share/dict/words"
WORDS = open(word_file).read().splitlines()


for x in WORDS:
    myRawList = []
    myRawListWithCount = []

    # filters out words that don't start with 'a"
    if x.startswith("a"):
        myRawList.append(x)

    # word len. cannot exceed 5
    for y in myRawList:
        if (len(y)) <= 5:
            myRawListWithCount.append(y)

# the line that causes an error. Simpler/shorter lists for names etc seem to work OK with the command.
print(random.choice(myRawListWithCount))

>Solution :

Try changing the scope of your lists. It’s possible that it doesn’t like you accessing it in the way you currently are with two different scopes.

myRawList = []
myRawListWithCount = []
for x in WORDS:
    

    # filters out words that don't start with 'a"
    if x.startswith("a"):
        myRawList.append(x)

    # word len. cannot exceed 5
    for y in myRawList:
        if (len(y)) <= 5:
            myRawListWithCount.append(y)

# the line that causes an error. Simpler/shorter lists for names etc seem to work OK with the command.
print(random.choice(myRawListWithCount))