Help for creating a hangman game

[tidiz]

Hi,

I'm trying to make a hangman game that should look like this:

Welcome to Hangman
______
Your guess: c
Success!
__cc__
Your guess: b
Failure! You have tried tried 1 times!
__cc__
.
.
.
Your guess: r
Success!
soccer
You won!

etc

In this game I'm trying to make it so that I first need to give a file - where game takes words - at commandline as a parameter to game. I've done that so far that program takes randomly a word from a certain file (here words.txt), prints blanks as a hintword and starts asking letters. My problem is that I can't make the program to check for the letters in word and replace blanks with guessed letter.

So far my code looks like that:

import sys
 
if sys.argv[1] == 'words.txt':
    list = open('words.txt','r')
    a = list.readlines()
 
    import random
 
    b = random.choice(a)
 
    print 'Welcome to Hangman'
    c = '_'*(len(b)-1)
    print c
    for i in range(1,6):
        mark = raw_input('Your guess: ')
        check = b.find(mark)
        if check != -1:
            print 'Succes!', mark, 'is in word at position', check
            c = c[:check] + mark + c[check + 1:]
            print c
        else:
            print 'Failure! You have tried tried %d times!' %(i)
 
else:
    print '[Errno2] No such file or directory: %s' %(sys.argv[1])
 

Can anyone tell me how to solve this problem? Sorry for the dots, but I didn't know any other way to get that structure showing right.

Edit: Thanks for the tip. I edited the code to show right :)

[boxfish]

I haven't taken a look at your problem yet, but you can enclose your code in code tags, [CODE] and [/CODE], and the parser won't eat the indentation.
Edit:
Thanks, that's much better.

[boxfish]

For some reason, you can't replace a character in a string with another character. The only way I know to get around this is to slice the string into two pieces and put the new character between them. It seems like there must be a better way to do this, but here it is:

c = c[:check] + mark + c[check + 1:]

And list is a reserved word. You shouldn't be using it as a variable name.
Hope this helps.

[tidiz]

Thanks for the help. It helped to replace those blanks with letters, but now I encountered a new one problem. If we have a word "soccer" and we are guessing the letter "c", program only takes the first letter and converts it, but not the other c. So here we would end in result "__c___". So in the end we will have result "soc_er".

I edited the current code for the first post.

[boxfish]

How about replacing the letters from b with underlines after they have been guessed?
Edit:
Never mind, that would make the user have to guess the same letter more than once.

[tidiz]

I think I need to fix that find-structure so that program wont stop finding at the first hit, but also checks the whole word for hits. Any recommendations for how to do this would be great as I am not very skilled with python... yet :)

[boxfish]

I have a book on Python with a hangman game example in it. It works something like

Clear out c.
For each letter in b:
    If the letter is equal to mark:
        Add mark to c.
    Else:
        Add a blank to c.

Hope this helps.
Edit:
Sorry, still won't work. Try it like this:

Create a new string.  Let's call it new_c.
For each letter in b:
    If the letter is equal to mark:
        Add mark to new_c.
    Else:
        Add a letter from the old c to new_c.
Replace c with new_c.

[bvdet]

This returns a list of indexes of letter in word s:

def idxList(s, letter, idx=0):
    ''' Return a list of indices of "letter" in string "s".'''
    if not type(s) == str:
        raise AttributeError, 'Argument 0 must be a string'
    idxList = []
    while True:
        idx = s.find(letter, idx)
        if idx == -1:
            return idxList
        idxList.append(idx)
        idx += 1

Example:
>>> idxList('mississippi', 's')
[2, 3, 5, 6]
>>>

To substitute the letters in the hint string, create a list of letters:

list(hint_string)

Iterate on the indexes list, and assign the list item to letter.

string_list[idx] = letter

Join the letters to form the new hint string:

''.join(string_list)

[tidiz]

Hi,

Thanks to you all for help. Somehow I wasn't able to make my code working exactly how you suggested, so I made it in different way. Maybe this coding isn't the best possible, but at least this works :)

import sys
 
if sys.argv[1] == 'words.txt':
    list1 = open('words.txt','r')
    list2 = []
    for word in list1.readlines():
        sana = word.replace('\n','')
        list2.append(sana)
 
    import random
 
    b = random.choice(list2)
 
    print 'Welcome to Hangman'
    hint = '_'*len(b)
    print hint
 
    counter = 0
 
    while counter < 5:
        if hint == b:
            print 'You win!'
            print 'Goodbye'
            break
        else:
            pass
        mark = raw_input('Your guess: ')
        if mark == '':
            counter += 1
            print 'Failure! You have tried tried %d times!' %(counter)
        else:
            counter2 = 0
            if mark in hint:
                counter += 1
                print 'Failure! You have tried tried %d times!' %(counter)
                print hint
            elif mark in b:
                print 'Success!'
                for i in b:
                    if mark == i:
                        x = list(hint)
                        x[counter2] = mark
                        hint = "".join(x)
                    counter2 += 1
                if hint != b:
                    print hint
                else:
                    pass
            else:
                counter += 1
                print 'Failure! You have tried tried %d times!' %(counter)
                if counter != 5:
                    print hint
                else:
                    pass
 
    else:
        print 'Game over! you lose!'
        print 'The word was %s' %(b)
        print 'Goodbye'
 
else:
    print "[Errno 2] No such file or directory: '%s'" %(sys.argv[1])