Question

A little stuck on the second part of PS5. So one of the functions has to return a piece of the words in word_list so you can determine if the fragment is able to become a real word.

Is there a way to take a list of words and take only, say, the first two letters of every word and compare those to another word to see if that will work?

-Ian

Answer 1

a word is a string and a fragment is a string ... take a look at the methods available for str types - take a good look, never know when you might need one
http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods

Answer 2

How's it look?

http://codepad.org/g7xvns2D

I thought there might be an easier way to handle to switch players bit. I was going to write a function to do it, but got caught up when I remembered that Python handles all variables by reference, but that those would be immutable, so I did what I knew would work and seems to be pretty easy to read.

Ignore the play_again boolean, I was fiddling around with having it replay once it's done.

The only other sticking point I had was the more than one letter inputed error handling, starts with while new_fragment == old_fragment. It seems like I could have implemented that a little better too. Is that bit of code enough to create another function in your guys' opinions?

-Ian

Answer 3

line 58 seems to contradict what is happening in lines 66-68

Your check for more than one character entered looks/reads fine. I tend to put little things like that in separate functions but after reading yours, it probably didn't need to be. If they tried to enter more than one, i didn't give them a second chance - i used the first letter:
http://dpaste.com/665449/

I handled the current player bit the same as you - seems like the simplest way to do it huh?

one thing i did different: i used a binary search through the wordlist when looking for a word that starts with the fragment. http://pastebin.com/gzYnfAns

"... strings are compared lexicographically.." http://docs.python.org/reference/expressions.html#notin