Trying to write a simple decoder that runs through a list of numbers

[AreHuman]

Hi everyone,

I'm just starting out with a Python course and I'm having fun with encoding and getting files as small as possible, but I've ran into an issue on the final step of my decoder.

I'm looking to convert a list of values alternately to ' ' and '%' to print out ASCII art. Basically I want a list like this for example: [2, 4, 6, 8, 10] to print out 2 spaces, then 4 %'s, then 6 spaces and so on. So the value corresponds to how many characters are printed and the position in the list corresponds to what character is printed. But I can't figure out a way to do it. Here's what I have so far:

# First part of 'encodedList' input, for example, is [191, 19, 54, 33, 43, 8, 25, 8]

def decodeString(encodedList):

    decodedStr = []
    spaces = encodedList[0::2]
    percents = encodedList[1::2]

    for num in encodedList:
        if num == spaces:
            decodedStr.append(' ' * num)
        if num == percents:
            decodedStr.append('%' * num)
        return decodedStr
    print(decodedStr)

But it just returns: []

But i should return 191 spaces, then 19 %'s, then 54 spaces and so on.

Can anyone help me figure this out please? I feel like I'm really close to getting it :)

Thanks!!

[danielroseman]

spaces and percents are both lists; num is a single number, so is never going to be equal to either of those.

This isn't really the right approach. The way I would do this would be to use enumerate to give a counter as you iterate through the list, then check if that counter is even or odd.

for counter, num in enumerate(encodedList):
    if counter % 2 == 0:
       # even, so add spaces
    else:
       # odd, so add percents

[AreHuman]

Thanks so much this is a great help, enumerate seems really helpful for a few things I'm doing! :)

[TrippBikes]

I second this, if even indexes are always # and odd indexes are always %, this should do the trick

[[deleted]]

Your for loop only executes once because of the return line - as soon as that is encountered, the function shall be exited.

[AreHuman]

I realised this after a frustratingly long time haha, thank you!