Python error: string index out of range python

Question

I'm currently learning python from a book called 'Python for the absolute beginner (third edition)'. There is an exercise in the book which outlines code for a hangman game. I followed along with this code however I keep getting back an error in the middle of the program.

Here is the code that is causing the problem:

if guess in word:

print("\nYes!", guess, "is in the word!") 

# Create a new variable (so_far) to contain the guess 

new = "" 

i = 0 

for i in range(len(word)): 

if guess == word[i]: 

new += guess 

else: 

           new += so_far[i] 

so_far = new

This is also the error it returns:

new += so_far[i] 

IndexError: string index out of range

Could someone help me out with what is going wrong and what I can do to fix it?

edit: I initialised the so_far variable like so:

so_far = "-" * len(word)

Answer 1

To get rid of this error you can try the following ways:-

if guess in word: 

print("\nYes!", guess, "is in the word!") 

new = "" 

i = 0 

for i in range(len(word)): 

if guess == word[i]: 

new += guess 

else: 

new += so_far[i] 

so_far = new 

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Answer 2

In Python, a string is a single-dimensional array of characters. The string index out of range means that the index you are trying to access does not exist. In a string, that means you're trying to get a character from the string at a given point. If that given point does not exist , then you will be trying to get a character that is not inside of the string. Indexes in Python programming start at 0. This means that the maximum index for any string will always be length-1. There are several ways to account for this. Knowing the length of your string (using len() function)could certainly help you to avoid going over the index.

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