This is a homework question. I need to define a function that takes a word and letter and deletes all occurrences of that letter in the word. I can't use stuff like regex or the string library. I've tried...
def delete(word,letter):
word = []
char = ""
if char != letter:
word+=char
return word
and
def delete(word,letter):
word = []
char = ""
if char != letter: #I also tried "if char not letter" for both
word = word.append(char)
return word
Both don't give any output. What am I doing wrong?
Well, look at your functions closely:
def delete(word,letter):
word = []
char = ""
if char != letter:
word+=char # or `word = word.append(char)` in 2nd version
return word
So, the function gets a word and a letter passed in. The first thing you do is throw away the word, because you are overwriting the local variable with a different value (a new empty list). Next, you are initializing an empty string char and compare its content (it’s empty) with the passed letter. If they are not equal, i.e. if letter is not an empty string, the empty string in char is added to the (empty list) word. And then word is returned.
Also note that you cannot add a string to a list. The + operation on lists is only implemented to combine two lists, so your append version is definitelly less wrong. Given that you want a string as a result, it makes more sense to just store the result as one to begin with.
Instead of adding an empty string to an empty string/list when something completely unrelated to the passed word happens, what you rather want to do is keep the original word intact and somehow look at each character. You basically want to loop through the word and keep all characters that are not the passed letter; something like this:
def delete(word, letter):
newWord = '' # let's not overwrite the passed word
for char in word:
# `char` is now each character of the original word.
# Here you now need to decide if you want to keep the
# character for `newWord` or not.
return newWord
The for var in something will basically take the sequence something and execute the loop body for each value of that sequence, identified using the variable var. Strings are sequences of characters, so the loop variable will contain a single character and the loop body is executed for each character within the string.
You're not doing anything with word passed to your function. Ultimately, you need to iterate over the word passed into your function (for character in word: doSomething_with_character) and build your output from that.
def delete(word, ch):
return filter(lambda c: c != ch, word)
Basically, just a linear pass over the string, dropping out letters that match ch.
filter takes a higher order function and an iterable. A string is an iterable and iterating over it iterates over the characters it contains. filter removes the elements from the iterable for which the higher order function returns False.
In this case, we filter out all characters that are equal to the passed ch argument.
I like the functional style #TC1 and #user2041448 that is worth understanding. Here's another implementation:
def delete( letter, string ):
s2 = []
for c in string:
if c!=letter:
s2.append( c )
return ''.join(s2)
Your first function uses + operator with a list which probably isn't the most appropriate choice. The + operator should probably be reserved for strings (and use .append() function with lists).
If the intent is to return a string, assign "" instead of [], and use + operators.
If the intent is to return a list of characters assign [], and use .append() function.
Change the name of the variable you are using to construct the returned value.
Assigning anything to word gets rid of the content that was given to the function as an argument.
so make it result=[] OR result="" etc..
ALSO:
the way you seem to be attempting to solve this requires you to loop over the characters in the original string, the code you posted does not loop at all.
you could use a for loop with this type of semantic:
for characterVar in stringVar:
controlled-code-here
code-after-loop
you can/should change the names of course, but i named them in a way that should help you understand. In your case stringVar would be replaced with word and you would append or add characterVar to result if it isn't the deleted character. Any code that you wish to be contained in the loop must be indented. the first unindented line following the control line indicates to python that the code comes AFTER the loop.
This is what I came up with:
def delete(word, letter):
new_word = ""
for i in word:
if i != letter:
new_word += i
return new_word
Related
I need to print a string, using this rules:
The first letter should be capital and make all other letters are lowercase. Only the characters a-z A-Z are allowed in the name, any other letters have to be deleted(spaces and tabs are not allowed and use underscores are used instead) and string could not be longer then 80 characters.
It seems to me that it is possible to do it somehow like this:
name = "hello2 sjsjs- skskskSkD"
string = name[0].upper() + name[1:].lower()
lenght = len(string) - 1
answer = ""
for letter in string:
x = letter.isalpha()
if x == False:
answer = string.replace(letter,"")
........
return answer
I think it's better to use a for loop or isalpha () here, but I can't think of a better way to do it. Can someone tell me how to do this?
For one-to-one and one-to-None mappings of characters, you can use the .translate() method of strings. The string module provides lists (strings) of the various types of characters including one for all letters in upper and lowercase (string.ascii_letters) but you could also use your own constant string such as 'abcdef....xyzABC...XYZ'.
import string
def cleanLetters(S):
nonLetters = S.translate(str.maketrans('','',' '+string.ascii_letters))
return S.translate(str.maketrans(' ','_',nonLetters))
Output:
cleanLetters("hello2 sjsjs- skskskSkD")
'hello_sjsjs_skskskSkD'
One method to accomplish this is to use regular expressions (regex) via the built-in re library. This enables the capturing of only the valid characters, and ignoring the rest.
Then, using basic string tools for the replacement and capitalisation, then a slice at the end.
For example:
import re
name = 'hello2 sjsjs- skskskSkD'
trans = str.maketrans({' ': '_', '\t': '_'})
''.join(re.findall('[a-zA-Z\s\t]', name)).translate(trans).capitalize()[:80]
>>> 'Hello_sjsjs_skskskskd'
Strings are immutable, so every time you do string.replace() it needs to iterate over the entire string to find characters to replace, and a new string is created. Instead of doing this, you could simply iterate over the current string and create a new list of characters that are valid. When you're done iterating over the string, use str.join() to join them all.
answer_l = []
for letter in string:
if letter == " " or letter == "\t":
answer_l.append("_") # Replace spaces or tabs with _
elif letter.isalpha():
answer_l.append(letter) # Use alphabet characters as-is
# else do nothing
answer = "".join(answer_l)
With string = 'hello2 sjsjs- skskskSkD', we have answer = 'hello_sjsjs_skskskSkD';
Now you could also write this using a generator expression instead of creating the entire list and then joining it. First, we define a function that returns the letter or "_" for our first two conditions, and an empty string for the else condition
def translate(letter):
if letter == " " or letter == "\t":
return "_"
elif letter.isalpha():
return letter
else:
return ""
Then,
answer = "".join(
translate(letter) for letter in string
)
To enforce the 80-character limit, just take answer[:80]. Because of the way slices work in python, this won't throw an error even when the length of answer is less than 80.
"""
This code takes two strings and returns a copy of the first string with
all instances of the second string removed
"""
# This function removes the letter from the word in the event that the
# word has the letter in it
def remove_all_from_string(word, letter):
while letter in word:
find_word = word.find(letter)
word_length = len(word)
if find_word == -1:
continue
else:
word = word[:find_word] + word[find_word + word_length:]
return word
# This call of the function states the word and what letter will be
# removed from the word
print(remove_all_from_string("bananas", "an"))
This code is meant to remove a defined string from a larger define string. In this case the larger string is "bananas" and the smaller string which is removed is "an".
In this case the smaller string is removed multiple times. I believe I am very close to the solution of getting the correct output, but I need the code to output "bas". Instead, it outputs "ba".
The code is supposed to remove all instances of "an" and print whatever is left, however it does not do this. Any help is appreciated.
Your word_length should be len(letter), and as the while ensures the inclusion, don't need to test the value of find_word
def remove_all_from_string(word, replacement):
word_length = len(replacement)
while replacement in word:
find_word = word.find(replacement)
word = word[:find_word] + word[find_word + word_length:]
return word
Note that str.replace exists
def remove_all_from_string(word, replacement):
return word.replace(replacement, "")
You can simply use the .replace() function for python strings.
def remove_all_from_string(word, letter):
word = word.replace(letter, "")
return word
print(remove_all_from_string("bananas", "an"))
Output: bas
The Python language has built-in utilities to do that in a single expression.
The fact that you need to do that, indicates you are doing sme exercise to better understand coding, and that is important. (Hint: to do it in a single glob, just use the string replace method)
So, first thing - avoid using built-in tools that perform more than basic tasks - in this case, in your tentative code, you are using the string find method. It is powerful, but combining it to find and remove all occurrences of a sub-string is harder than doing so step by step.
So, what ou need is to have variables to annotate the state of your search, and your result. Variables are "free" - do not hesitate in creating as many, and updating then inside the proper if blocks to keep track of your solution.
In this case, you can start with a "position = 0", and increase this "0" until you are at the end of the parent string. You check the character at that position - if it does match the starting character of your substring, you update other variables indicating you are "inside a match", and start a new "position_at_substring" index - to track the "matchee". If at any point the character in the main string does not correspond to the character on the substring: not an occurrence, you bail out (and copy the skipped charactrs to your result -therefore you also have to accumulate all skipped characters in a "match_check" substring) .
Build your code with the simplest 'while', 'if' and variable updates - stick it all inside a function, so that whenever it works, you can reuse it at will with no effort, and you will have learned a lot.
I'm newbie in Python so that I have a question. I want to change letter in word if the first letter appears more than once. Moreover I want to use input to get the word from user. I'll present the problem using an example:
word = 'restart'
After changes the word should be like this:
word = 'resta$t'
I was trying couple of ideas but always I got stuck. Is there any simple sollutions for this?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: In response to Simas Joneliunas
It's not my homework. I'm just finished reading some basic Python tutorials and I found some questions that I couldn't solve on my own. My first thought was to separate word into a single letters and then to find out the place of the letter I want to replace by "$". I have wrote that code but I couldn't came up with sollution how to get to specific place and replace it.
word = 'restart'
how_many = {}
for x in word:
how_many=+1
else:
how_many=1
for y in how_many:
if how_many[y] > 0:
print(y,how_many[y])
Using str.replace:
s = "restart"
new_s = s[0] + s[1:].replace(s[0], "$")
Output:
'resta$t'
Try:
"".join([["$" if ch in word[:i] else ch for i, ch in enumerate(word)])
enumerate iterates through the string (i.e. a list of characters) and keeps a running index of the iteration
word[:i] checks the list of chars until the current index, i.e. previously appeared characters
"$" if ch in word[:i] else ch means replace the character at existing position with $ if it appears before others keep the character
"".join() joins the list of characters into a single string.
This is where the python console is handy and lets you experiment. Since you have to keep track of number of letters, for a good visual I would list the alphabet in a list. Then in the loop remove from the list the current letter. If letter does not exist in the list replace the letter with $.
So check if it exists first thing in the loop, if it exists, remove it, if it doesn’t exist replace it from example above.
I have been noticing a problem I am having whenever I try to make a function that takes changes a string or a list then returns it.
I will give you an example of this happening with a code I just wrote:
def remove_exclamation(string):
string.split(' ')
for i in string:
i.split()
for char in i:
if char == '!':
del char
''.join(i)
' '.join(string)
return string
For instance, I create this code to take a string as its parameter, remove any exclamation in it, the return it changed. The input and output should look like this:
>>>remove_exclamation('This is an example!')
'This is an example'
But instead I get this:
>>>remove_exclamation('This is an example!')
'This is an example!'
The function is not removing the exclamation in the output, and is not doing what I intended for it to day.
How can I keep avoiding this when I make for loops, nested for loops etc?
You write your code and formulate your question as if it was possible to modify strings in Python. It is not possible.
Strings are immutable. All functions which operate on strings return new strings. They do not modify existing strings.
This returns a list of strings, but you are not using the result:
string.split(' ')
This also:
i.split()
This deletes the variable named char. It does not affect the char itself:
del char
This creates a new string which you do not use:
''.join(i)
This also:
' '.join(string)
All in all, almost every line of the code is wrong.
You probably wanted to do this:
def remove_exclamation(string):
words = string.split(' ')
rtn_words = []
for word in words:
word_without_exclamation = ''.join(ch for ch in word if ch != '!')
rtn_words.append(word_without_exclamation)
return ' '.join(rtn_words)
But in the end, this does the same thing:
def remove_exclamation(string):
return string.replace('!', '')
Without clearly knowing the intentions of your function and what you are attempting to do. I have an alternative to the answer that zvone gave.
This option is to remove any characters that you have not defined in an allowed characters list:
characters = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ "
test_string = "This is an example!"
test_string = ''.join(list(filter(lambda x: x in characters, test_string)))
print(test_string)
This outputs:
This is an example
Note, this is the Python 3 version.
Python 2, you do not need the ''.join(list())
Doing it this way would allow you to define any character that you do not want present in your string, and it will remove them.
You can even do the reverse:
ignore_characters= "!"
test_string = "This is an example!"
test_string = ''.join(list(filter(lambda x: x not in ignore_characters, test_string)))
print(test_string)
Strings are immutable in Python. And you cannot change them. You can however, re-assign there values.
That is where your problem lies. You never reassign the value of your strings, when you call .split() on them.
But there are also others errors in your program such as:
Your indention
The fact that your just returning the string thats passed into the function
Your use of the del statement
etc.
Instead, create a new string by iterating through the old one and filtering out the character(s) you do not want, via list comprehension and ''.join().
def remove_exclamation(string):
return ''.join([char for char in string if char != '!'])
But as #Moses has already said in the comments, why not just use str.replace()?:
string = string.replace('!', '')
def remove_exclamation(string):
#you think you are splitting string into tokens
#but you are not assigning the split anywhere...
string.split(' ')
#and here you are cycling through individual _chars_ in string which was not affected by the split above ;-)
for i in string:
#and now you are splitting a 1-char string and again not assigning it.
i.split()
And string is still your input param, which I assume is of type str. And immutable.
On top of which, if you were import/using the string module, you would be shadowing it
A big part of your confusion is knowing when the methods mutate the objects and when they return a new object. In the case of strings, they never mutate, you need to assign the results to a new variable.
On a list however, and the join() somewhere makes me think you want to use a list, then methods generally change the object in place.
Anyway, on to your question:
def remove_exclamation(inputstring, to_remove="!"):
return "".join([c for c in inputstring if c != to_remove])
print (remove_exclamation('This is an example!'))
output:
This is an example
def make_new_words(start_word):
"""create new words from given start word and returns new words"""
new_words=[]
for letter in start_word:
pass
#for letter in alphabet:
#do something to change letters
#new_words.append(new_word)
I have a three letter word input for example car which is the start word.
I then have to create new word by replacing one letter at a time with every letter from the alphabet. Using my example car I want to create the words, aar, bar, car, dar, ear,..., zar. Then create the words car, cbr, ccr, cdr, cer,..., czr. Finally caa, cab, cac, cad, cae,..., caz.
I don't really know what the for loop should look like. I was thinking about creating some sort of alphabet list and by looping through that creating new words but I don't know how to choose what parts of the original word should remain. The new words can be appended to a list to be returned.
import string
def make_new_words(start_word):
"""create new words from given start word and returns new words"""
new_words = []
for i, letter in enumerate(start_word):
word_as_list = list(start_word)
for char in string.ascii_lowercase:
word_as_list[i] = char
new_words.append("".join(word_as_list))
return new_words
lowercase is just a string containing the lowercase letters...
We want to change each letter of the original word (here w) so we
iterate on the letters of w, but we'll mostly need the index of the letter, so we do our for loop on enumerate(w).
First of all, in python strings are immutable so we build a list x from w... lists are mutable
Now a second, inner loop on the lowercase letters: we change the current element of the x list accordingly (having changed x, we need to reset it before the next inner loop) and finally we print it.
Because we want to print a string rather than the characters in a list, we use the join method of the null string '' that glue together the elements of x using, of course, the null string.
I have not reported the output but it's exactly what you've asked for, just try...
from string import lowercase
w = 'car'
for i, _ in enumerate(w):
x = list(w)
for s in lowercase:
x[i] = s
print ''.join(x)
import string
all_letters = string.ascii_lowercase
def make_new_words(start_word):
for index, letter in enumerate(start_word):
template = start_word[:index] + '{}' + start_word[index+1:]
for new_letter in all_letters:
print template.format(new_letter)
You can do this with two loops, by looping over the word and then looping over a range for all letters. By keeping an index for the first loop, you can use a slice to construct your new strings:
for index in enumerate(start_word):
for let in range(ord('a'), ord('z')+1):
new_words.append(start_word[:index] + chr(let) + start_word[index+1:])
This could work as a brute-force approach, although you might end up with some performance issues when you go to try it with longer words.
It also sounds like you might want to constrain it only to words that exist in a dictionary at some point, which is a whole other can of worms.
But for right now, for three-letter words, you're onto something of the right track, although I worry that the question might be a little too specific for Stack Overflow.
First, you will probably have more success if you loop through the index for the word, rather than the letter:
alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
for i in range(len(start_word)):
Then, you can use a slice to grab the letters before and after the index.
for letter in alphabet:
new_word = start_word[:i] + letter + start_word[i + 1:]
Another approach is given above, which casts the string to a list. That works around the fact that python will disallow simply setting start_word[i] = letter, which you can read about here.