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Python Python Basics (2015) Letter Game App Letter Game Introduction

Jing Zhou
Jing Zhou
2,162 Points
Posted by Jing Zhou
Jing Zhou
2,162 Points

For letter in secret_words, Is the letter a variable or does it have special meaning?

For letter in secret_words,

Is the "letter" in this line means something special or just a variable name? In other words, if I change it to a different name, Is it still gonna work?

2 Answers

Jennifer Nordell
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher
Jennifer Nordell
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher

That's exactly right! The letter is just a variable name. It will be used when accessing each individual item in that list. Kenneth just picked a variable name that made sense. Here are some other examples of things that make sense. 

for fruit in fruit_basket:

for book in reading_list:

Each iteration through the loop will look at the next individual item and assign the value to the variable name after the for.

Hope this helps! :sparkles:

Jing Zhou
Jing Zhou
2,162 Points
Jing Zhou
Jing Zhou
2,162 Points

Thank you! I'm still a little confused. The "secret_words" is a list of words, not "letters", but when you say: letter in secret_words, you actually inspecting each letters in a word? Does my question make sense?

Jennifer Nordell
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher
Jennifer Nordell
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher

I would say that you misread the code. The actual code is:

for letter in secret_word:

The value stored in secret_word is a string that was randomly selected from this line:

secret_word = random.choice(words)

This line pulls a random word from this list:

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

So the value stored in secret_word is one string such as "apple". So for every letter in that string or:

for letter in secret_word:

Make sense? Hope this helps! :sparkles:

Jing Zhou
Jing Zhou
2,162 Points
Jing Zhou
Jing Zhou
2,162 Points

I think I understand now! Just to confirm, so the "For xx in xx" structure is not just used to pick things from a list, it can be a string as well? And for string, it automatically consider each letter in the string, correct?

Jennifer Nordell
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher
Jennifer Nordell
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher

Yes. Another way to say it would be each individual item in an iterable. And a string is iterable in Python. Which means that in the case that the iterable is a string the "individual" item will be a character of the string :smiley:

Jing Zhou
Jing Zhou
2,162 Points
Jing Zhou
Jing Zhou
2,162 Points

Thank you so much, Jennifer. You are a great help!