Plibs

A Python implementation of MadLibs (that runs in the browser with Streamlit)

Gallery

To be added

Demo

https://plibs.herokuapp.com/

Explanation

Before we start, it's important to understand what the following are:

Blanks: Anything that is meant to be filled by the user. In the texts, blanks are surrounded by two underscores.

The following are blanks:
- __verb__: meant to be filled by a verb
- __verb-ing__: meant to be filled by a verb ending in ing.
- __noun__: meant to be filled by a noun
Blanks can contain anything, and they serve as a prompt to what the user should enter. The following are valid blanks:
- __occupation__
- __animal__
ID-ed blanks: Just like blanks, but when the text only has a single one of the blanks. All blanks with a slash followed by a number are ID-ed blanks

A blank can be used for a name. For instance __name/1__ and __dog/1__ are valid ID-ed blanks.

See the example of a text below.
Fills: These are what the user enters in a blank.
Texts: The entire text, which contains blanks and ID-ed blanks for the users to fill.

Here is an example of a text:

Example

My dog's name is __dog/1__, and I __verb__ him. __dog/1__ was born in the year __year__. Him and I __verb__ around a lot.

Blanks:

__verb__ *2
__year__

ID-ed blanks

__dog/1__

Here is an example of the possible fills:

__verb__: "love"
__verb__: "play"
__year__: "2017"
__dog/1__: "Scruffy"

With the above fills, the output will be:

My dog's name is Scruffy, and I love him. Scruffy was born in the year 2017. Him and I play around a lot.

How it works

The below text will be used as the example input text:

My dog's name is __dog/1__, and I __verb__ him. __dog/1__ was born in the year __year__. Him and I __verb__ around a lot.

1. Reading the text file

All files in texts/ are valid texts with blanks and ID-ed blanks.

All words are gone through. A word is a blank or ID-ed blank if it has two underscores before or after ("__"). They are added to a dictionary (blanks_dict), where the blank is the key:

# blanks_dict
{
  'dog/1': '',
  'verb': [],
  'year': []
}

Note how the only ID-ed blank (dog/1) has the value of an empty string, while the other two have an empty list.

At the same time, blanks_counter is created, which stores the number of times each blank is in the text:

# blank_counter
Counter({'verb': 2, 'year': 1})

Note how the ID-ed blank (dog/1) is not in the counter. This is because it has only one value.

2. Filling the blanks

TO fill blanks, blanks_dict's keys are looped, and the user is prompted to enter fills for the blanks.

For the ID-ed blanks, only one fill is required.

For the above example, the user is asked for:

3* verbs
1* year
dog/1

So at the end of this step, blanks_dict could end up looking like this:

# blanks_dict
{
  'dog/1': 'Scruffy',
  'verb': ['play', 'love'],
  'year': ['1969']
}

Note that the list of keys (blanks_dict.keys()) are shuffled before asking for fills.

3. Creating the output text using the fills

This is probably the simplest. It only involves replacing the the blanks in the original text with fills, creating the new text. The only thing to look out for is ensuring that punctuation is added after words with blanks. The output for the example can be:

My dog's name is Scruffy, and I love him. Scruffy was born in the year 1969. Him and I play around a lot.

Pipenv commands

pipenv install <package-name>
pipenv lock -r > requirements.txt

ninest / plibs