I think you’re misunderstanding the insert method. insert keeps everything that was already in the list, including the item at the given index. it just shifts part of it to the right to make room for the thing you’re inserting. Directly changing the list using display[position] = letter instead replaces the item at the index with letter.

Does that make sense?

Having the output of each thing you tried would help us get a feel for where your code was messing up without us having to run it ourselves to get the output.

That said, for code snippet 1, you’re inserting the letter instead of replacing the underscore with the letter. Not only that, but your for-loop essentially does the following:

• loop over the length of chosen_word
• if guess is in the above loop
  • iterate over the display array and add guess that many times (effectively doubling the `display array)

Your second code snippet does the same thing, but with actual formatting so that Python could run the code.

I believe your third code snippet introduces char but then returns to letter. It might work if you replaced char with letter again. Also += letter will add the letter to the end of display, which is not what you want to do.

I did my own version of Hangman in Python a couple years ago if you want to look at the code and see what I did. I’m just a hobbyist, so it’s not fantastic, but it might give you an idea of how someone else has approached the problem.

Don’t forget Python’s amazing list comprehension syntax!

guess = input(“Guess a letter:”).lower()
display = [ letter if letter == guess else “_” for letter in word ]

Just one part of your question, but it saves a lot of futzing around with indices and replaces.

I think what tripped you up here is that you iterated over the wrong object. In your second solution:

for letter in chosen_word:
  if guess == letter:
    for i in range(len(chosen_word[letter])):
      display.insert(i, guess)

while in the correct solution:

for position in range(word_length):
  letter = chosen_word[position]
  if letter == guess:
    display[position] = letter

The most important difference here is that in your code block, you iterate over the letters, ie. 'a', 'a', 'r', ..., while in the second you iterate over the numerical indices of the string, 0, 1, 2, .... In this specific use case, it’s much easier to use the numerical indices - because you can see how the second code block is using position in two places - once to retrieve the letter from the solution, and then again to update the display when the if condition matches.

Usually we prefer iteration using the method you used in your solution. But in this case, it’s easier to just iterate by index because you’re retrieving the element from one string, and updating the same position in the other string. You have no way of knowing what position to modify in display unless you have the numerical position, so it’s much easier to iterate that way in this case.

This is a pretty compact and - I think - easy to read way of doing it:

while(display != list(chosen_word)):

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

display = list(map(lambda c, d: c if d != '_' or c == guess else d, chosen_word, display))

print(display)

print("Congrats! You did it!")

Mapping over an array is a pretty powerful tool and also using ternary expressions. If you’re not familiar, a map basically just iterates over an array and runs a function on that item, replacing it with whatever the return value of the function is.

For example:

ones = [1, 1] twos = list(map(lambda n: n + 1, ones))

It’s running the lambda function with n as a parameter and returning n + 1, and it’s pulling the numbers from the array “ones”.

Then ternary expressions I also find quite powerful. The format of which is basically:

(result if true) if (condition to check) else (result of false)

Or:

2 if 1 + 1 == 2 else "You broke math. How did you do that?"

Based on the first example:

If you want to help yourself a bit, enumerate your for loop. enumerate turns an iterable (like a list, or in this case a string) into an iterable of tuples, with contents being an int representing the index of an item and the item itself:

for (i, letter) in enumerate(chosen_word):

(Side note, the parenthesis surrounding (i, letter) are optional. I purposely included them to show that it’s a tuple.)

i will be the index of each character, and letter will be the character itself. You can then do:

if letter == guess:

And to wrap it up, do list assignment by index. Someone already mentioned why not to use insert in this scenario, so I won’t repeat them. The following will instead overwrite the item at display index i with the guessed character:

display[i] = guess

So - ChatGPT is great for breaking down concepts like this and answering questions about the basics until you get the hang of it. I would recommend crafting some programs while asking it for help on anything you get stuck with, until you can craft the programs without involving it (and still you can paste the programs into it and ask for pointers / fixes that it can see). I’m currently learning Go with assistance from ChatGPT and it’s hugely useful.

One other angle you could come at it from – this might venture into unpopularopinion territory, but I would actually recommend learning C at a very early stage. It’ll be tedious to make nontrivial programs with it, so you may not want to stick with it for your real projects, but since everything is bytes and pointers it gives you a chance to get extremely solid with the fundamentals before you start mucking around with slices / hashes / etc. I would recommend to try to get this particular problem working using C, which will be more work, but then when you come back and learn the Python concepts I think they’ll make a lot of sense and you’ll feel capable with them. IDK if it’ll work that way for you, but that’s what I did and I feel like it was a good way to go.

Best of luck + keep plugging

I think the other guys have already explained it quite well, but here are some more goodies that might interest you.

Your first attempt of filling the display is the more pythonic way in my opinion and it works, so instead of initializing an empty array and the filling it, just use display = ["_"]*word_length

Also for evaluating if the guess is in the word, there is a very nice iterator called enumerate, that hands you two values, the index and the actual value of the item, so you can use it like this:

for position, letter in enumerate(chosen_word):
    if letter == guess:
        display[position] = letter

Also, to play the full game you want to surround your guessing part with a while loop, so you can keep guessing until you have found the word. For this you will have to create a list of characters that resemble your chosen_word. There are several ways to do so and I will try to explain some of them.

Here we are using the unpacking asterisk, that unpacks each character of your string into an item in the list

while (display != [*chosen_word]):
    guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()

    for position, letter in enumerate(chosen_word):
        if letter == guess:
            display[position] = letter
    print(display)

Another way would be explicitly casting the string into a list with the list function like this:

while (display != list(chosen_word)):

Last but not least we could use something like list comprehension, which is seen as very pythonic but a bit weird to look at when you are not used to it.

while (display != [letter for letter in chosen_word]):

What this essentially does is the same as creating a for loop and filling a list like this, but more comprehensive:

chosen_word_list = []
for letter in chosen_word:
    chosen_word_list.append(letter)

W3Schools has some nice info about list comprehension. It is a rather advanced concept though so don’t let it bother you if you don’t get it right away.

Happy coding :)