Search Python list and return 2 or more of the same character

Question

Hey,

I've just started to learn Python and I'm creating the game Hangman. I've got the basic functionality down. I have a list containing the words and they're randomly selected. I have an input for the user to guess letters and check it against the list that the word is split into, I have another list that the correctly guessed letters are put into at the position they are in the randomly selected word.

The problem I am having is that if the word has a letter within it more than once, it will only find the first letter and add that. How would I go about looking for all instances of a letter and adding them?

This is the code I'm using to map guessed letters against the randomly selected word.

if user_input in choose_word:
    print "Good guess!"
    print trys_remaining, "trys remaining!"
    word_index = letter_list.index(user_input)
    correct_letters[word_index] = user_input

If anyone could point me in the right direction, it would be great.

Answer 1

You need to loop over all matching indices:

for word_index, letter in enumerate(letter_list):
    if letter == user_input:
        correct_letters[word_index] = user_input

Note: If the loop would be for letter in letter_list: you would only iterate over letters but won't get the corresponding index. The enumerate() function allows to get the index at the same time. See also the enumerate documentation.

Answer 2

You can use a list comprehension:

correct_letters = [letter if user_input == letter else correct
                   for (correct, letter) in zip(correct_letters, letter_list)]

Note that this will create a new correct_letters list, instead of modifying the original one.