title: How to make this random text generator more efficient in Python?
body: <p>I'm working on a random text generator -without using Markov chains- and currently it works without too many problems. Firstly, here is my code flow:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Enter a sentence as input -this is called trigger string, is assigned to a variable-</p></li>
  <li><p>Get longest word in trigger string</p></li>
  <li><p>Search all Project Gutenberg database for sentences that contain this word -regardless of uppercase lowercase-</p></li>
  <li><p>Return the longest sentence that has the word I spoke about in step 3</p></li>
  <li><p>Append the sentence in Step 1 and Step4 together</p></li>
  <li><p>Assign the sentence in Step 4 as the new 'trigger' sentence and repeat the process. Note that I have to get the longest word in second sentence and continue like that and so on-</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>And here is my code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import nltk
  from nltk.corpus import gutenberg
  from random import choice
  
  triggerSentence = raw_input("Please enter the trigger sentence: ")#get input str
  longestLength = 0
  longestString = ""
  listOfSents = gutenberg.sents() #all sentences of gutenberg are assigned -list of  list format-
  listOfWords = gutenberg.words()# all words in gutenberg books -list format-
  
  while triggerSentence:
      #so this is run every time through the loop
      split_str = triggerSentence.split()#split the sentence into words
  
      #code to find the longest word in the trigger sentence input
      for piece in split_str:
          if len(piece) &gt; longestLength:
              longestString = piece
              longestLength = len(piece)
  
      #code to get the sentences containing the longest word, then selecting
      #random one of these sentences that are longer than 40 characters
      sets = []
      for sentence in listOfSents:
          if sentence.count(longestString):
              sents= " ".join(sentence)
              if len(sents) &gt; 40:
              sets.append(" ".join(sentence))
  
      triggerSentence = choice(sets)
      print triggerSentence
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My concern is, the loop mostly reaches to a point where the same sentence is printed over and over again. Since it is the longest sentence that has the longest word. To counter getting the same sentence over and over again, I thought of the following:</p>
  
  <p>*If the longest word in the current sentence is the same as it was in the last sentence, simply delete this longest word from the current sentence and look for the next longest word.</p>
  
  <p>I tried some implementations for this but failed to apply the solution above since it involves lists and list of lists -due to words and sentences from gutenberg module-. Any suggestions about how to find the second longest word ? I seem to be unable to do this with parsing a simple string input since .sents() and .words() functions of NLTK's Gutenberg module yield list of list and list respectively. Thanks in advance. </p>