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Python Python Collections (Retired) Slices sillyCase

Posted by Ankush Jain
Ankush Jain
2,800 Points

sillycase

not sure why it is not working

silly.py 
# The first half of the string, rounded with round(), should be lowercased.
# The second half should be uppercased.
# E.g. "Treehouse" should come back as "treeHOUSE"

def sillycase (instring) :
    wordLen = len(instring)
    halfwordLen = int(wordLen/2)
    firsthalf = instring[:round(halfwordLen)]

    secondhalf = inString[halfwordLen:]

    for char in firsthalf:
          newFirstString = firsthalf.replace(char,char.lower())
    for char in secondhalf:
          newSecondString = secondhalf.replace(char,char.upper())

    return (newFirstString + newSecondString)

3 Answers

Stephen Bone
Stephen Bone
12,359 Points
Stephen Bone
Stephen Bone
12,359 Points

Hi Ankush

The initial error I receive is NameError: name 'inString' is not defined on the line below. This is because you've put a capital 'S' in this variable but not anywhere else so this just needs to be changed to match the rest.

secondhalf = inString[halfwordLen:]

So once that's corrected and I call your function with sillycase('treehouse') the output received is treehousE which still isn't quite what we need. The cause of this is that your for loop keeps resetting the values of newfirstString and newSecondString so for example newSecondString does the below on each iteration of the loop:

House                                                                                  
hOuse                                                                                  
hoUse                                                                                  
houSe                                                                                  
housE

I imagine with a bit of thought you could make this work or you could just use the upper and lower methods you already take advantage of to change the entire strings in one go rather than looping. So for example you could just do something like:

    firsthalf = firsthalf.lower()
    secondhalf = secondhalf.upper()

    return firsthalf + secondhalf

Hope it helps!

Nabil Kamel
Nabil Kamel
7,170 Points
Nabil Kamel
Nabil Kamel
7,170 Points

Try to always use a piece of paper and a pen to really see what you need. The only thing you need to know here is the index of the letter that separates the word.

  • the 'round' function was not necessary as you already changed the value into an int.
  • you don't need to loop as you are separating the word. You just need to apply the corresponding method(upper or lower)
  • always comment your functions inside the definition as I did here.
def sillycase (w) :
    """
    The first half of the string, rounded, should be lowercased.
    The second half should be uppercased.
    E.g. "Treehouse" should come back as "treeHOUSE"
    """
    i = int(len(w)/2)
    return (w[:i].lower() + w[i:].upper())
Brandon Raper
Brandon Raper
5,360 Points
Brandon Raper
Brandon Raper
5,360 Points

I think it gives erroneous results when casting your halfwordLen as an INT. Any odd number divided by two would have the decimal places truncated. My round() is more like this...

i = round(float(len(mystr)/2))