Question

I’m writing a program that reads in two proteins of the same (string) length and returns how many of the amino acid letters are different. I managed to write the some of the bits but unfortunately couldn’t complete all of it so can any please guide through this by having a look on my code:

a = raw_input("Cheetah protein: ")
b = raw_input("Domestic cat protein: ")
u=zip(a,b)
d=dict(u)
x = 1
for i,j in d.items(): 
    if i == j:
        x = x + 1   
print x

This the output I want to produce:

Cheetah protein: IGADKYFHARGNYDAA
Domestic cat protein: KGADKYFHARGNYEAA
2 difference(s).

Answer 1

a="IGADKYFHARGNYDAA"
b="KGADKYFHARGNYEAA"

u=zip(a,b)          
x = 0               # not 1
for i,j in u:       # you don't need a dict here
    print i,j, 
    if i != j:      # they differ iff they are not equal to each other
        x = x + 1
        print "  neq" 
    else:
        print " eq"  
print x