how to save a variable in a if statement in a loop

Question

I'm trying to program hangman and I run into a problem. In line 48 you see that I'm trying to copy the word that has been guessed so far. But the problem is when the program asks for the next letter. For example, if the user have guessed the letter 'h', it says h____ and the next turn I guess the letter e it says _e___ but I want it to say in this example he___.

word = 'hello'
guessed = False
guess_word = secret_word(word)
a = '____'

while guessed == False:
    letter = ask_letter_from_user()

    if is_the_letter_in_the_word(word, letter):
        locatie_letter_in_woord = location_of_letter_in_word(word, letter)
        a = replace(guess_word, locatie_letter_in_woord, letter)
        print(a)

Do you mean that you want to call `replace(guess_word, locatie_letter_in_woord, letter)` repeatedly for each letter the user has already guessed, instead of only the letter that the user has *just* guessed? — mkrieger1, Nov 28 '21 at 19:56
Does this answer your question? [Changing one character in a string](https://stackoverflow.com/q/1228299/6045800) — Tomerikoo, Nov 28 '21 at 20:08

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 28 '21 at 19:59

Seems like a and guess_word should actually be one variable.

You are passing guess_word to the replace function after every guessed letter, but you are never updating its value. Instead, you're updating a.

Get rid of a. Next time, give all your variables meaningful names, then you might realized that you have two variables for one purpose :-)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 28 '21 at 19:59

Instead of calling replace(guess_word, locatie_letter_in_woord, letter), simply do a = a[:locatie_letter_in_woord] + letter + a[locatie_letter_in_woord+1:]. This will prevent the previous letter from being overwritten.

Output:

wich letter do you want to try?: h
well done! you guessed the letter
youre guessed letters are: h
a: h___
wich letter do you want to try?: e
well done! you guessed the letter
youre guessed letters are: h,e
a: he__

Django · Answer 3 · 2021-11-28T20:15:16.630

Try this:

you can turn the word into a list and have each letter checked one by one

word = 'hello'
guessed = False
found = []
guess_word = secret_word(word)

while guessed == False:
    guess= ask_letter_from_user()

    if is_the_letter_in_the_word(word, letter):
        print('well done! you guessed the letter')
        word_as_list = list(guess_word)
        indices = [i for i, letter in enumerate(word) if letter == guess]
        for index in indices:
            word_as_list[index] = letter
            found.append(letter)
        print('youre guessed letters are: ' + list_joining(found))

        guess_word = "".join(word_as_list)
        print(guess_word)

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Nov 29 '21 at 00:19

In line 47 in place of:

a = replace(guess_word, locatie_letter_in_woord, letter)

write

a = replace(a, locatie_letter_in_woord, letter)

wich letter do you want to try?: h
well done! you guessed the letter
youre guessed letters are: h
h___
wich letter do you want to try?: e
well done! you guessed the letter
youre guessed letters are: h,e
he__
wich letter do you want to try?:

Still, this program has a problem. When you are calling the function:

def location_of_letter_in_word(word, letter):
    return word.find(letter)

Look carefully for the second l in hello; it will return the location of the first l.

how to save a variable in a if statement in a loop

4 Answers4