Question

I’m writing a hangman code, and am having trouble with setting an error for an invalid letter guess (ie. the guess should be between a-z, no numbers or multiple letter strings). This may be a fairly simple solution, but I am having trouble formalizing the code. Here is how I implemented the code:

while ((count < 6) and win):
   guess = input("Please enter the letter you guess: ")
   if guess:
      try:
         guess = guess.lower()
         lettersCorrect += 1
      if (guess not in letterList): #SYNTAX ERROR
         print ("You need to input a single alphabetic character!")
         continue

I noted where I am getting the syntax error. letterList is a list I created containing all acceptable letters (a-z). Is my coding off, or is there an easier way to say, “if not in letterList”.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Your try block is pointless. Also, instead of letterList, you can use string.lowercase

import string

while count < 6 and win:
   guess = input("Please enter the letter you guess: ")
   if guess:
      guess = guess.lower()
      if guess not in string.lowercase:
         print("You need to input a single alphabetic character!")
         continue
      lettersCorrect += 1