Question

So I’m working on a text based game in which I want the user to type their next action in. I’m trying to work out a way to code it so that it may be less “picky”. I want the game to accept partial input (for example n instead of north), also I want it to ignore prefixes such as “go”.

I’ve worked out the partial input with a for-loop, it also accepts input with the “go” prefix.
However, if I simply type “go” without entering a direction it defaults to “north”, which is the first part of my list of valid commands. This problem also appears when giving empty input.

What I’m looking for now is a way to let the prefix vary, with something like “check” in front of map or “walk” in front of south. I also need to make it recognize when the input only contains a prefix and not an actual command.

This is the relevant code at the moment.

move_input = input("You silently ask yourself what to do next.\n").lower()
    for n in valid_moves:
        if n.startswith(move_input) or ("go " + n).startswith(move_input):
            move_input = n

Answer 1

You can try splitting it to words:

noise = ['go', 'check', 'walk']
commands = [word for word in move_input if word not in noise]
# process commands

If you want to have different prefixes for different commands, you can have something like:

prefixes = {('map', 'inventory'): ('check',),
            ('north', 'south', 'east', 'west'): ('go', 'walk')}
commands = [word for word in move_input if word not in noise]
if len(commands) == 1:
   command = commands[0]
else:
    assert len(commands) == 2 # or decide what to do otherwise
    for com, pref in prefixes.items():
        if commands[0] in pref and commands[1] in com:
           command = commands[1]
           break
    else:
        print('Invalid command')

But it is starting to look too complex.