comment on

Well here's an alternate, a complete waste of cycles as it scales linearly with the number of words returned, OTOH it is not bounded by the size of the dictionary. (As is) It can also return duplicates, yada yada yada.

my(@lines, $line); open(FILE, shift) || die;
until( scalar @lines == $ARGV[0] ){
  seek(FILE, 0, $. = 0);
  rand($.) < 1 && ($line = $_) while <FILE>;
  push(@lines, $line);
}
print @lines, "wc -l could have told you this is $. words\n";
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It's based on "How do I select a random line from a file?" in perlfaq5. I'd be interested in seeing if anybody else has a better means of extending this algorythm to report multiple entries.

-- perl -pe "s/\b;([st])/'\1/mg"

In reply to Re: Estimating Vocabulary by belg4mit
in thread Estimating Vocabulary by YuckFoo

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