Loop “Forgets” to Remove Some Items [duplicate]

Answer 1

Try to not use the list() function on a string. It will make things a lot more complicated.

Unlike Java, in Python, strings are considered as arrays. Then, try to use an index for loop and del keyword.

for x in range(len(string)):
    if string[x].lower() in "aeiou":
        del string[x]

Answer 2

You shouldn't delete items from list you iterating through: But you can make new list from the old one with list comprehension syntax. List comprehension is very useful in this situation. You can read about list comprehension here

So you solution will look like this:

text = "Hey look Words!"

def anti_vowel(text):
    return "".join([char for char in list(text) if char.lower() not in 'aeiou'])

print anti_vowel(text)

It's pretty, isn't it :P

Answer 3

You're modifying the list you're iterating over, which is bound to result in some unintuitive behavior. Instead, make a copy of the list so you don't remove elements from what you're iterating through.

for char in textlist[:]: #shallow copy of the list
    # etc

---

To clarify the behavior you're seeing, check this out. Put print char, textlist at the beginning of your (original) loop. You'd expect, perhaps, that this would print out your string vertically, alongside the list, but what you'll actually get is this:

H ['H', 'e', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'o', 'o', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!']
e ['H', 'e', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'o', 'o', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!']
  ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'o', 'o', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!'] # !
l ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'o', 'o', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!']
o ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'o', 'o', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!']
k ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'o', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!'] # Problem!!
  ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'o', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!']
W ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'o', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!']
o ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'o', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!'] 
d ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!']
s ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!']
! ['H', 'y', ' ', 'l', 'k', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'd', 's', '!']
Hy lk Words!

So what's going on? The nice for x in y loop in Python is really just syntactic sugar: it still accesses list elements by index. So when you remove elements from the list while iterating over it, you start skipping values (as you can see above). As a result, you never see the second o in "look"; you skip over it because the index has advanced "past" it when you deleted the previous element. Then, when you get to the o in "Words", you go to remove the first occurrence of 'o', which is the one you skipped before.

---

As others have mentioned, list comprehensions are probably an even better (cleaner, clearer) way to do this. Make use of the fact that Python strings are iterable:

def remove_vowels(text): # function names should start with verbs! :)
    return ''.join(ch for ch in text if ch.lower() not in 'aeiou')

Answer 4

List Comprehensions:

vowels = 'aeiou'
text = 'Hey look Words!'
result = [char for char in text if char not in vowels]
print ''.join(result)