Question

I'm working on the very first iterative problem in PS03. I'm not sure if what I've started is remotely close to what it should be, but here's my code nonetheless: http://dpaste.com/590997/

Useful answers much appreciated. Getting "it's just wrong" with a snippet of code and no explanation is not helpful to me.

Answer 1

The big problem... your for loop isn't going to iterate. The return statement on line 8 is going to hit on your first time through the loop... returning either 1 or 0 (when the find function returns 0 or -1); and the function will end.

Even clearing that hurdle doesn't help much: you're iterating over each character in your target string (for s in target), but you're not using the change to alter the test conditions... so if you ran through the sequence, you'd either get a result of 0 (key not found) or len(target) -- the number of characters in the target string (because you increased the counter every time through the loop).

To compare.... http://dpaste.com/591132/

Answer 2

Thanks! This has helped out a lot.