bleep

Bleep Instructions

tl;dr

Implement a program that censors messages that contain words that appear on a list of supplied "banned words."

$ python bleep.py banned.txt
What message would you like to censor?
What the heck
What the ****
$ python bleep.py banned.txt
What message would you like to censor?
gosh darn it
**** **** it

Specification

Complete the implementation of bleep.py in such a way that it:

• Accepts as its sole command-line argument the name (or path) of a dictionary of banned words (i.e., text file).
• Opens and reads from that file the list of words stored therein, one per line, and stores each in a Python data structure for later access. While a Python list will work well for this, you may also find a set useful here.
• If no command line argument (e.g., banned.txt) is provided, be sure to have your program exit with a status code of 1.
• You may assume that any text files the staff tests with will have one word per line (each line terminated with a \n), and any alphabetic characters in those words will be lowercase.
• Prompts the user to provide a message.
• Tokenizes that message into its individual component words, using the split method on the provided string, and then iterates over the list of "tokens" (words) that is returned by calling split, checking to see whether any of the tokens match, case-insensitively, any of the words in the banned words list.
• Prints back the message that the user provided, except if the message contained any banned words, each of its characters is replaced by a *.
• For example, gosh should be replaced with four * characters, while fudge should be replaced with five.
• You should not censor words that merely contain a banned word as a substring. For example, if bar is a banned word in the provided list, then none of barns nor crowbar nor wheelbarrow should be censored.
• You explicitly do not need to support input strings that contain punctuation marks. You may assume we will only test your input where each word is only separated by whitespace.

Usage

Your program should behave per the examples below. Assume that the underlined text is what some user has typed.

$ python bleep.py
Usage: python bleep.py dictionary

$ python bleep.py list1.txt list2.txt list3.txt
Usage: python bleep.py dictionary

$ python bleep.py banned.txt
What message would you like to censor?
hello world
hello world

$ python bleep.py banned.txt
What message would you like to censor?
what the heck
what the ****

$ python bleep.py banned.txt
What message would you like to censor?
gosh darn it
**** **** it

Full instructions available here