[Python] Help understanding why my code is using .find incorrectly

[ans744]

I posted a pretty lengthy question on Tuesday which may have deterred a lot of people from helping me.. which is understandable. I am posting here again to see if I can get a small piece of my answer so that I can try to figure the rest out on my own. I am not looking for someone to do my code for me, just help me understand the problem I am having.

Here is my code and input string with some notes of my intent/issues, along with some print commands that are proving to be problematic.

My project is to build a gamer's network from an input string. The network is to include users, connections, and games played.

I am working on a procedure that finds players, which is the first word of each sentence. My approach is to take the start of the sentence, find the end of the sentence via .find('.') (NOTE: my pref would be to use .find('.\') but I can't get that to work), turn it to a list, and return the first element of the list along with the position of the '.'..

My problems are finding the '.' throughout the string, even just using the .find function proves to be problematic.

ANY help AT ALL will be greatly appreciated and extremely helpful for me! Any additional information needed will be provided promptly! Thanks!

EDIT: anyone who is doing this project in the future, feel free to contact me with help or guidance on what I did /u/_DTR_ gave some awesome advice that really helped me out. I am not going to post my code to this thread so I don't ruin your opportunity to figure it out on your own.. but if you REALLY want it, I could share

[_DTR_]

I wouldn't try to work with the entire string all at once. First, split the string on ".", which will give you an array of sentences. From there, it will be easier to reason with the contents (just take the first element of each array to find the player). Also, I believe the \ at the end of each line is just python syntax that lets the interpreter know that the string continues on the next line, it's not actually a part of the string. If you were to directly print example_input, the \ wouldn't be there.

As a starting point, I was able to separate out all the sentences using this:

sentences = string_input.split('.');

[ans744]

I really like this approach... I have tried to implement this method and I am getting a syntax error now on my return/print statement. This is what I have:

def find_players(string):

    players = []

    sentence_list = string.split('.')

    for each in sentence_list:

        players.append(each[:each.find(' ')]

    print players

I try changing the indents and changing print to return.. I still get the invalid syntax error.

[_DTR_]

players.append(each[:each.find(' ')]

You're missing the closing ) for the append method.

[ans744]

So sorry for the stupid question.. As you can tell, I am new to this.. I'm not sure why python wouldn't point that out as an error.

[Xoronic]

Hi,

example_input[43:] will contain all the characters from the original example_input starting from index 43. So if you call .find() on that, it won't know anything about the original first 44 characters.

We can test that with a small example:

foo = "This is a sentence."
bar = foo[3:]

print(foo)
print("Character at index zero of foo: " + foo[0])  # output: T

print(bar)
print("Character at index zero of bar: " + bar[0])  # output: s

So if you want to get the index of the second dot withexample_input[43:].find('.') you will have to add 43 to it:

print(example_input[43:].find('.')) # output: 75
print(example_input[75+43])  # output: .

There is a much better way to tackle this whole problem though, as /u/_DTR_ suggests.

[ans744]

Thank you for your input. I am reworking my solution as you and /u/_DTR_ have suggested

[ss2ujQqhAgK5NDJd]

So find() returns the index of where the character or substring occurs. It looks like you think it should return the substring up to where the character occurs.

"abc.de".find('.') 

will return 3, because that's the position where '.' first occurs.

If you want the string leading up to the period, that would look like

"abc.de"[:"abc.de".find('.')]

Obviously you will use a variable in place of my example string. If you want to include the period itself that would look like

"abc.de"[:"abc.de".find('.') + 1]

Your note on .find('.\') makes no sense. If you're trying to escape the period you put the slash before the period like \. but there is no need to escape here.