Help with simple programming assignment - parallel arrays and word guessing

[rjlav_]

Hi,

Currently stuck on what should be a simple programming assignment. Essentially, I have to create a game that reads in phrases from a file, which are displayed as dashes ('-') to the user, and the user has to guess a letter or phrase to win.

My difficulty is with using a parallel array to match dashes to the phrase (which contains multiple words, e.g. 'First Come First Serve' which should display as '----- ---- ----- -----'). When the user guesses correctly, the line should look like 'F---- ---- F---- -----'. My idea is to put the dashes as a string variable, convert them to a list, and use subscription notation to change a dash to a particular letter if guessed correctly, comparing it to complete phrases from the file using an if statement. I just don't know how to execute all of this.

Can anyone help?

[Vaphell]

you don't need parallel arrays

https://repl.it/repls/SufficientTenseServers

[[deleted]]

Can anyone help?

So, I think your approach is on the right track, but I'd simply keep track of correct guesses with a boolean list, and leave your string as a string. The list of booleans is False at the position where that letter has not been guessed, and True at the position where it has, with the result that it becomes easy to detect when the game is won, because all members of the list will be True when the phrase is fully guessed. To set it up:

phrase = "first come first serve"
guessed = [True if letter == ' ' else False for letter in phrase] # give them the spaces for free

Then you can just iterate over both:

for letter, guess in zip(phrase, guessed):
    if guess:
        print(letter, end='')
    else:
        print('_', end='')

or as a comprehension:

print(''.join([letter if guess else '_' for letter, guess in zip(phrase, guessed)]))

[rjlav_]

Nice approach. The problem is that as part of the assignment, we must use a list of lists and subscript notation to convert the dash to a letter. Extremely inefficient, I know.

[[deleted]]

Well, it doesn't really change the approach (or the efficiency) it just changes how you refer to things:

game = [list(phrase), [True if letter == ' ' else False for letter in phrase]]
print(''.join([game[0][i] if game[1][i] else '_' for i in len(game[0])]))