Why does my code print off 18 instead of 10, and could you provide any solutions?

Question

I\'m relatively new to python, just started learning at school at we\'ve been given a task to complete, it asks for you to get a sentence and turn it into a list of words.

Answer 1

In your sentence, the list becomes:

['ASK', 'NOT', 'WHAT', 'YOUR', 'COUNTRY', 'CAN', 'DO', 'FOR', 'YOU', 'ASK', 'WHAT', 'YOU', 'CAN', 'DO', 'FOR', 'YOUR', 'COUNTRY', 'POTATO']

POTATO is the 18th element. You should create a new list with no duplicates:

singles = []
for word in words:
    if word not in singles:
        singles.append(word)

You can then use singles.index(word) instead of words.index(word). Even better:

used = {}
index = 0
for word in words:
    if word in used:
        print(used[word])
    else:
        index += 1
        print(index)
        used[word] = index

Yes, it's longer, but it is more efficient.