[Tutor] trouble with list.remove() loop

[Christian Witts]

On 25/09/2010 20:44, D Ryan (2) wrote:
> Hello all,
> I am currently trying to write a program which can find the solution to a
> game of hangman.
> In a part of the program, a user inputs a letter, a tester tells him if
> the word contains that letter, and then if the answer is no, all words
> containing that letter are removed from the list of remaining candidates.
> However, the code I've written seems to remove some, but not all the words
> containing the letter. Strangely though, if i run it a few more times it
> gets some of the ones it missed the 1st time round, untill after enough
> iterations it gets all of them. I cant understand why it doesnt remove all
> of them the first time round. I have cut the offending code and formatted
> it to work on its own, and also to fit into a relatively short email.
>
> # A sample list of words, one of which is the answer.
> candidates = ["abacus","amazing",
>                "ozimandias",
>                "a","alphanumeric",
>                "functioning"]
>
> # In the following code, the user has guessed the letter 'a',
> # and the tester has told him that the letter 'a' is not in the word.
>
> user_guess="a"
> tester_response="no"
>
> # The following code should eliminate all words which contain the letter
> # 'a', leaving only the word 'functioning' in the list
>
> if tester_response in ("No","no","n","N","NO"):
>      for word in candidates:
>          if user_guess in word:
>              print word, "removed.."
>              candidates.remove(word)
> print candidates
>
> Running once gives this output
>
> abacus removed..
> ozimandias removed..
> alphanumeric removed..
> ['amazing', 'a', 'functioning']
>
> But if i run it again it successfully removes 'amazing, and the next time
> it removes 'a', leaving the correct answer. I'm perplexed by this strange
> behaviour and would be most appreciative of any help. I'm very new to
> python so apologies for any formatting/style errors, and also for the
> simplicity of the problem.
>
> Best regards
> Dave
>
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>    

You are mutating the list that you are iterating over so in essence you 
are looking at the word in list index 0, testing it, and removing it, 
then moving onto list index 1 but now your list has 'amazing' in index 0 
so that does not get checked.

The simplest way is to iterate through a new list with this
     for word in candidates[:]:

That will create a new list that you will iterate over while you mutate 
the original list.

-- 
Kind Regards,
Christian Witts