Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
print(letter, end=' ')
print()
This
for
loop one line 71 will display all the missed guesses that the player has made.
When you play Hangman on paper, you usually write down these letters off to the side so
you know not to guess them again. On each iteration of the loop the value of
letter
will
be each letter in
missedLetters
in turn. Remember that the
end=' '
will replace the
newline character that is printed after the string is replaced by a single space character.
If
missedLetters
was
'ajtw'
then this
for
loop would display
a j t w
.
Displaying the Secret Word with Blanks
So by this point we have shown the player the hangman board and the missed letters. Now
we want to print the secret word, except we want blank lines for the letters. We can use the _
character (called the underscore character) for this. But we should print the letters in the
secret word that the player has guessed, and use _ characters for the letters the player has not
guessed yet. We can first create a string with nothing but one underscore for each letter in
the secret word. Then we can replace the blanks for each letter in
correctLetters
. So if
the secret word was
'otter'
then the blanked out string would be
'_____'
(five _
characters). If
correctLetters
was the string
'rt'
then we would want to change the
blanked string to
'_tt_r'
. Here is the code that does that:
75. blanks = '_' * len(secretWord)
76.
77. for i in range(len(secretWord)): # replace blanks with
correctly guessed letters
78. if secretWord[i] in correctLetters:
79. blanks = blanks[:i] + secretWord[i] + blanks
[i+1:]
80.
81. for letter in blanks: # show the secret word with
spaces in between each letter
Line 75 creates the
blanks
variable full of _ underscores using string replication.
Remember that the
*
operator can also be used on a string and an integer, so the expression
'hello' * 3
evaluates to
'hellohellohello'
. This will make sure that
blanks
has the same number of underscores as
secretWord
has letters.
Then we use a
for
loop to go through each letter in
secretWord
and replace the
underscore with the actual letter if it exists in
correctLetters
. Line 79 may look
confusing. It seems that we are using the square brackets with the
blanks
and
secretWord
variables. But wait a second,
blanks
and
secretWord
are strings, not
lists. And the
len()
function also only takes lists as parameters, not strings. But in Python,
many of the things you can do to lists you can also do to strings:
