A Little Motivation

Early on, we learned a bit about lists, which look like this:

['rose', 'violet', 'buttercup']

We're going to create a small application that will print a random motivational saying every time a user presses Enter. Our first step will be to create a list of positive sayings:

motivational_phrases = [
    "You look awesome today!",
    "You're a Python prodigy!",
    "You write lists like a pro!"
    ]

Lists open with a square bracket [, have items seperated with commas, and end with a square bracket ], like this:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Our positivity list above spreads the list out over multiple lines for greater readability, which is allowed in Python. Remember that you can change the strings in the list to whatever phrases you choose.

Now that we have our sayings, let's use it in conjunction with some functionality from our random module:

import random

motivational_phrases = [
    "You look awesome today!",
    "You're a Python prodigy!",
    "You write lists like a pro!"
    ]

print(random.choice(motivational_phrases))

The random.choice function chooses a random item from a list and returns it. Note that it's good Python style to put all import statements at the top of a file.

As with our weather app, this positive saying generator could be improved by making it so the program doesn't have to run again every time to get new output. Let's add a while loop for the final version:

while True:
    import random

    motivational_phrases = [
        "You look awesome today!",
        "You're a Python prodigy!",
        "You write lists like a pro!"
        ]

    print(random.choice(motivational_phrases))
    input()

The empty input() statement at the end means that the user has to hit Enter again in order to see a new phrase.

This brings us to the end of our Python session. Note that much of what we worked on involved manipulating various kinds of information, a domain in which Python excels. In the next session on databases, you'll learn another tool for quickly storing and retrieving much larger sets of data.