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

So here's your list of words, with the potato example:

>>> y = "ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY POTATO"
>>> words = y.split()
>>> print([words.index(s)+1 for s in words])
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 3, 9, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 18]

The reason it prints '18' is that the word "potato" hasn't appeared before, and there are 18 items in the list of words:

>>> for word_number, word in enumerate(words):
...     print(word_number+1, word)
...
1 ASK
2 NOT
3 WHAT
4 YOUR
5 COUNTRY
6 CAN
7 DO
8 FOR
9 YOU
10 ASK
11 WHAT
12 YOU
13 CAN
14 DO
15 FOR
16 YOUR
17 COUNTRY
18 POTATO

index() returns the first time it finds that item in the list. Potato wasn't in the sentence previously, so the last index is returned, which is 17+1.