Question

I am trying to receive user input and then put it into a list. I have a working version, however, I feel as though it is redundant(the first block seems redundant, though if I take it away, it doesn’t work). Any way this can be improved?
Thanks

def pastChoice():
     choice = raw_input("> ")
     prevMove = []
     prevMove.append(choice)

for i in prevMove:
     choice = raw_input("> ")
     prevMove.append(choice)
     print prevMove

pastChoice()

I am making a game and I want to show the user what choices they have already made.

Ex. Type ‘history’ if you would like to see previous choices

[‘a’,’a’,’c’,’b’]

Answer 1

I’m not sure about your intentions for this code, but this is roughly equivalent:

def pastChoice():
    prevMove = []

    while True:
        choice = raw_input("> ")
        prevMove.append(choice)
        print prevMove
pastChoice()

the block:

 choice = raw_input("> ")
 prevMove = []
 prevMove.append(choice)

asks user for input and appends it to prevMove, so at loop start, the condition i in prevMove evaluates i to the first element in prevMove, then because in the second block you’re appending new elements to prevMove, the iteration continues over those the newly appended elements and the loop never ends.

If you remove the first block, but keep the for loop, it won’t work because there are no elements inside prevMove and therefore nothing to iterate over.