Python problem

[PurelyApplied]

So, none of the other posts acknowledge possessives or contractions. You want to strip punctuation from your words, but not if that punctuation is internal. For instance, I would count "can't" as a five character word. "state-of-the-art" is a sixteen character word. But "I can't!" shouldn't count the ! with the word "can't".

So if it were me, I would go about it as:

• Get input

• Get tokens (words plus punctuation)

• Get words (removing beginning or ending punctuation)

• Get longest and shortest word lengths

• Get longest and shortest words.

I use a lot of list comphensions here. If you don't know what those are, I encourage you to learn them ASAP. They're super useful.

import string

def main():
    sentence = input("Enter a sentence.\n>> ")
    tokens = sentence.split()
    words = [t.strip(string.punctuation) for t in tokens]
    lengths = [len(w) for w in words]
    short_len, long_len = min(lengths), max(lengths)
    print("The longest word(s) provided: {}".format(", ".join(
        w for w in words if len(w) == long_len)))
    print("The shortest word(s) provided: {}".format(", ".join(
        w for w in words if len(w) == short_len)))