so ill post a few of my failed examples below along with what I came up with as a fix, and then the actual correct code. I feel like im so close to grasping this, but missing some logic. this is for a hangman game.

one of the failed attempts:

import random
word_list = ["aardvark", "baboon", "camel"]
chosen_word = random.choice(word_list)

#Testing code
print(f'Pssst, the solution is {chosen_word}.')

#Create an empty List called display.
#For each letter in the chosen_word, add a "_" to 'display'.
#So if the chosen_word was "apple", display should be ["_", "_", "_", "_", "_"] with 5 "_" representing each letter to guess.


display = ["_"] * len(chosen_word)


guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()

#If the letter at that position matches 'guess' then reveal that letter in the display at that position.
#e.g. If the user guessed "p" and the chosen word was "apple", then display should be ["_", "p", "p", "_", "_"].

for letter in chosen_word:
if guess == letter:
for i in range(len(chosen_word)):
display.insert(i, guess)

print(display)

second:

for letter in chosen_word:
  if guess == letter:
    for i in range(len(chosen_word[letter])):
      display.insert(i, guess)

I ended up just saying screw it and went to this:

display = []
for char in chosen_word:
    if guess == letter:
        display += letter
   else:
    display += "_"

correct way of doing it:

import random
word_list = ["aardvark", "baboon", "camel"]
chosen_word = random.choice(word_list)

print(f'Pssst, the solution is {chosen_word}.')

display = []
word_length = len(chosen_word)
for _ in range(word_length):
  display += "_"
print(display)
  
guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()


for position in range(word_length):
  letter = chosen_word[position]
  if letter == guess:
    display[position] = letter

print(display)

so as you can see, i get that I can grab specific parts of a list using indices or slices, but somewhere in my brain my logic is wrong. if you guys have struggled with this before or if you have a good youtube video to help me break it down id be beyond thankful!

  • @[email protected]English
    6•1 year ago

    Having the output of each thing you tried would help us get a feel for where your code was messing up without us having to run it ourselves to get the output.

    That said, for code snippet 1, you’re inserting the letter instead of replacing the underscore with the letter. Not only that, but your for-loop essentially does the following:

    • loop over the length of chosen_word
    • if guess is in the above loop
      • iterate over the display array and add guess that many times (effectively doubling the `display array)

    Your second code snippet does the same thing, but with actual formatting so that Python could run the code.

    I believe your third code snippet introduces char but then returns to letter. It might work if you replaced char with letter again. Also += letter will add the letter to the end of display, which is not what you want to do.

    I did my own version of Hangman in Python a couple years ago if you want to look at the code and see what I did. I’m just a hobbyist, so it’s not fantastic, but it might give you an idea of how someone else has approached the problem.