Python error IndexError string index out of range

Question

I m currently learning python from a book called  Python for the absolute beginner  third edition    There is an exercise in the book which outlines code for a hangman game  I followed along with this code however I keep getting back an error in the middle of the program    Here is the code that is causing the problem   if guess in word      print   nYes    guess   is in the word           Create a new variable  so far  to contain the guess     new          i   0     for i in range len word            if guess    word i               new    guess         else              new    so far i          so far   new   This is also the error it returns   new    so far i  IndexError  string index out of range   Could someone help me out with what is going wrong and what I can do to fix it   edit  I initialised the so far variable like so   so far    -    len word

User · Accepted Answer

It looks like you indented so far   new too much  Try this   if guess in word      print   nYes    guess   is in the word           Create a new variable  so far  to contain the guess     new          i   0     for i in range len word            if guess    word i               new    guess         else              new    so far i      so far   new   unindented this

User · Answer

You are iterating over one string  word   but then using the index into that to look up a character in so far  There is no guarantee that these two strings have the same length

User · Answer

There were several problems in your code  Here you have a functional version you can analyze  Lets set  hello  as the target word    word    hello  so far    -    len word          Create variable so far to contain the current guess  while word    so far             if still not complete     print so far      guess   input   gt  gt             get a char guess      if guess in word          print   nYes    guess   is in the word             new              for i in range len word                  if guess    word i                   new    guess          fill the position with new value             else                  new    so far i       same value as before         so far   new     else          print  try again    print  finish     I tried to write it for py3k with a py2k ide  be careful with errors

User · Answer

This error would happen when the number of guesses  so far  is less than the length of the word  Did you miss an initialization for the variable so far somewhere  that sets it to something like  so far         len word       Edit   try something like  print   d    d     new  so far    before the line that throws the error  so you can see exactly what goes wrong  The only thing I can think of is that so far is in a different scope  and you re not actually using the instance you think

[python] Python error: "IndexError: string index out of range"

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