Trying to delete vowels from a string fails

Question

What's wrong with this code? The aim is to check wether the entered string contains vowels and delete them

Here is the code:

def anti_vowel(text):
    text = str(text)
    vowel = "aeiouAEIOU"
    for i in text:
        for i in vowel.lower():
            text = text.replace('i',' ')
        for i in vowel.upper():
            text = text.replace('i',' ')
    return text

It's a lesson on Codecademy

Answer 1

You are trying to replace the string with the value 'i', not the contents of the variable i.

Your code is also very inefficient; you don't need to loop over every character in text; a loop over vowel is enough. Because you already include both upper and lowercase versions, the two loops over the lowercased and uppercased versions are in essence checking for each vowel 4 times.

The following would be enough:

def anti_vowel(text):
    text = str(text)
    vowel = "aeiouAEIOU"
    for i in vowel:
        text = text.replace(i,' ')
    return text

You are also replacing vowels with spaces, not just deleting them.

The fastest way to delete (rather than replace) all vowels would be to use str.translate():

def anti_vowel(text):
    return text.translate(text.maketrans('', '', 'aeiouAEIOU'))

The str.maketrans() static method produces a mapping that'll delete all characters named in the 3rd argument.