Question

May I kindly ask you for help.

I must write a program in python for homewrok which it asks two competitors alternately for one single letter. The program is over when there is no such word in dictionary (I imported dictionary which it is in text format that I get from teacher).

Here is how it should look like:

Competitor 1, letter a: m

Competitor 2, letter b: o

Competitor 1, letter a: u

Competitor 2, letter b: s

Competitor 1, letter a: e

Competitor 2, letter b: i

There is no such word mousei in dictionary!

And here is how I started:

dictionary=open("dictionary.txt", encoding="latin2").read().lower().split()
a=input("Competitor 1, letter a:")
b=input("Competitor 2, letter b:")
word=a+b

while word in dictonary:
      a=input("Competitor 1, letter a:")
      word=word+a
      b=input("Competitor 2, letter b:")
      word=word+b

print("There is no such word" ,word, "in dictionary!")

But something is wrong. Because when I start program and I write first two letters. It says there is no such word in dictionary.

Please help me!

One more thing: The game must stop immediately after the first wrong character. Could you please show how to make this.

Answer 1

That’s because your condition is wrong! You shouldn’t check if the word is in dictionary, but if there is a word in the dictionary that starts with the word!

Here is one possible solution (maybe not the prettiest one):

word_ok = True
dictionary=open("dictionary.txt", encoding="latin2").read().lower().split()
a=raw_input("Competitor 1, letter a:")
b=raw_input("Competitor 2, letter b:")
word=a+b

while word_ok:
        word_ok = False
        for dict_word in dictionary:
            if dict_word.startswith(word):
                word_ok = True
                break
        if word_ok:                                
            a=raw_input("Competitor 1, letter a:")
            word=word+a
            b=raw_input("Competitor 2, letter b:")
            word=word+b
        else:
            break

print("There is no such word" ,word, "in dictionary!")

EDIT:

OK, here is a kind of compilation from the other answers. Note that encoding is not a valid keyword parameter to the builtin open() function. If you want to specify the encoding, use codecs.open(). Note as well that the word check is done twice within the while loop, after each competitor’s input.

import codecs

dictionary = codecs.open('dictionary.txt','r',encoding='latin2').read().lower().split()

# Word we will build
word = ''

while True:
    letter = raw_input("C1: ")
    word = word + letter
    if not any(known_word.startswith(word) for known_word in dictionary):
        break

    letter = raw_input("C2: ")
    word = word + letter
    if not any(known_word.startswith(word) for known_word in dictionary):
        break

print "There is no such word", word, "in dictionary!"