Not printing "You win!..."

Question

When I guess the word right, the "You win!..." message does not print.

import random

make a list of words

words = [ 'apple', 'banana', 'orange', 'coconut', 'strawberry', 'lime', 'grapefruit', 'lemon', 'kumquat', 'blueberry', 'melon' ]

while True: start = input("Press enter/return to start, or enter Q to quit") if start.lower() == 'q': break

# pick a random word
secret_word = random.choice(words)
bad_guesses = []
good_guesses = []

while len(bad_guesses) < 7 and len(good_guesses) != len(list(secret_word)): 
    # draw spaces
    # draw guessed letters, spaces, and strikes
    for letter in secret_word:
        if letter in good_guesses:
            print(letter, end='')
        else:
            print('_', end='')

    print('')
    print("Strikes: {}/7".format(len(bad_guesses)))
    print('')

    #take a guess
    guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()

    if len(guess) != 1:
        print("You can only guess a single letter!")
        continue
    elif guess in bad_guesses or guess in good_guesses:
        print("You've already guessed that letter!")
        continue
    elif not guess.isalpha():
        print("You can only print letters!")
        continue

    if guess in secret_word:
        good_guesses.append(guess)
        if len(good_guesses) == len(list(secret_word)):
            print("You win! The word was {}.".format(secret_word))
            break                 
    else:
        bad_guesses.append(guess)
else:
    print("You didn't guess it! My secret word was {}.".format(secret_word))

Answer 1 · 2017-04-02T17:53:21Z

April 2, 2017 5:53pm

I had the same issue, Kennedi.

The problem is that strings with multiple occurrences of a single letter will never make it past these lines:

good_guesses.append(guess)
if len(good_guesses) == len(list(secret_word)):

For example, if the string being evaluated is apple, and on the first guess the user enters p, then len(good_guesses) will return 1, because we're only adding 1 occurrence of p to the list. It makes sense on the surface, because there's only been 1 good guess thus far - but we're set up to fail because we're evaluating the amount of good guesses against the amount of letters in the target.

So, in the case of apple, when the user reaches the end, good_guesses will contain ['a' , 'p', 'l', 'e'], len(good_guesses) will return 4, while len(list(secret_word)) returns 5.

I'm sure there's a more elegant solution, but I was able to get around this by using count() and then adding each occurrence of the letter to the list before counting.

# check for multiple occurrences of guess
occurrences = secret_word.count(guess)
# += will add each occurrence as a separate instance -
good_guesses += (guess * occurrences)
# now check the length

I couldn't get it to work with append(), because it added the occurrences on as an additional list, but += seemed to do the trick. Here's my working code - hope this is helpful!

import random

# make a list of words
words = [
    'apple',
    'banana',
    'coconut',
    'strawberry'
]

while True:
    start = input("Press enter to start, or Q to quit: ")
    if start.lower() == 'q':
        break

    # pick a random word
    secret_word = random.choice(words)
    bad_guesses = []
    good_guesses = []

    while len(bad_guesses) < 7 and len(good_guesses) != len(list(secret_word)):

        # draw spaces guessed letters and strikes
        for letter in secret_word:
            if letter in good_guesses:
                print(letter, end='')
            else:
                print('_', end='')

        print('')
        print('Strikes: {}/7'.format(len(bad_guesses)))
        print('')

        # take guess
        guess = input('Guess a letter: ').lower()

        if len(guess) != 1:
            print("You can only guess a single letter!")
            continue
        elif guess in bad_guesses or guess in good_guesses:
            print("You already guessed that letter!")
            continue
        elif not guess.isalpha():
            print("You can only guess letters!")
            continue

        if guess in secret_word:

            # check for multiple occurrences of guess
            occurrences = secret_word.count(guess)
            print('Guess occurs {} times in the secret word'.format(occurrences))
            # list.append() adds as a list, ie. ['a', ['pp'], 'l', 'e']
            # += will add each occurrence as a separate instance -
            good_guesses += (guess * occurrences)
            # now check the length
            if len(good_guesses) == len(list(secret_word)):
                print("you win! The word was {}".format(secret_word))
                break
        else:
            bad_guesses.append(guess)
    else:
        print("You did not guess it! My secret word was {}".format(secret_word))

Answer 2 · 2017-03-28T05:14:48Z

March 28, 2017 5:14am

You had a bit of a formatting issue in the way you posted your code in the question, so I'm not sure what your problem actually is. Once I took it into my private environment and adjusted the tabbing to what I thought would work I was left with a functional program that worked as expected. I'll add it here so you can have a look through it and try to find the difference that makes your version fail, but I'm guessing it has something to do with a misplaced or missing indent.

import random

words = [ 'apple', 'banana', 'orange', 'coconut', 'strawberry', 'lime', 'grapefruit', 'lemon', 'kumquat', 'blueberry', 'melon' ]

while True: 
  start = input("Press enter/return to start, or enter Q to quit") 
  if start.lower() == 'q': break

  # pick a random word
  secret_word = random.choice(words)
  bad_guesses = []
  good_guesses = []

  while len(bad_guesses) < 7 and len(good_guesses) != len(list(secret_word)): 
      # draw spaces
      # draw guessed letters, spaces, and strikes
      for letter in secret_word:
          if letter in good_guesses:
              print(letter, end='')
          else:
              print('_', end='')

      print('')
      print("Strikes: {}/7".format(len(bad_guesses)))
      print('')

      #take a guess
      guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()

      if len(guess) != 1:
          print("You can only guess a single letter!")
          continue
      elif guess in bad_guesses or guess in good_guesses:
          print("You've already guessed that letter!")
          continue
      elif not guess.isalpha():
          print("You can only print letters!")
          continue

      if guess in secret_word:
          good_guesses.append(guess)
          if len(good_guesses) == len(list(secret_word)):
              print("You win! The word was {}.".format(secret_word))
              break                 
      else:
          bad_guesses.append(guess)
  else:
      print("You didn't guess it! My secret word was {}.".format(secret_word))

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Kennedi Armstrong

Kennedi Armstrong

Not printing "You win!..."

make a list of words

2 Answers

Jimmy Smutek

Jimmy Smutek

Sam Bui

Sam Bui

Mike Wagner

Mike Wagner