this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
31 points (89.7% liked)

Programming

17406 readers
57 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Even as an experienced python dev I sometimes prefer explicit for loops over list comprehensions. I think for people who didn't even grasp the concept of a for loop they are more confusing than helping.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm not a fan of them overall. I think multiple lines is more readable. There are a LOT of people that disagree with me though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I thought I was the only one... to me unless it's a super-simplistic comprehension, it has a similar effect as when C programmers write if (xx = !(1 == (a ? !c : 34 ^ blit_target))) {. Congratulations, you fit it all on one line! At the expense of totally destroying my train of thought when I'm trying to scan down the code and figure out what the hell's going on. Well done.