Indexing a string! Help me!

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February 23rd, 2013, 09:38 PM

laffytaffykidd

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Indexing a string! Help me!

My question is:
Words that start with a vowel or ’y’ and end with a vowel or ’y’.

So far I have,

Code:

def start_end_vowel(s):
	for i in range(0, len(s)-5):
		if (s[0] == 'a' or s[0] == 'e' or s[0] == 'i' or s[0] == 'o' or s[0] == 'u' or s[0] == 'y') and (s[len(s)-5] == 'a' or s[len(s)-5] == 'e' or s[len(s)-5] == 'i' or s[len(s)-5] == 'o' or  s[len(s)-5] == 'u' or s[len(s)-5] == 'y'):
			return True
	return False

There must be an easier method than this..... please help!!

February 24th, 2013, 02:37 AM

leonnaley2

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Could you post some input and output examples?

and instead of doing
if (s[0] == 'a' or s[0] == 'e' or s[0] == 'i' or s[0] == 'o' or s[0] == 'u' or s[0] == 'y')

you could just do
if s[0] in "aeiouy"

and maybe read up on slicing? Slicing is really powerful.

February 24th, 2013, 02:40 AM

leonnaley2

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btw,
"hello"[-1] returns an "o" because the index -1 is the last letter in the string.

February 24th, 2013, 03:23 AM

dariyoosh

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Quote:

Originally Posted by laffytaffykidd

... There must be an easier method than this..... please help!!

I use a regular expression for this problem, something like this:

Code:

import re

def checkForLetters(param_Text):
    prog = re.compile("^[aeiouy].*[aeiouy]$(?i)") 
    if prog.match(param_Text):
        return True
    else:
        return False

For more information about regular expressions, please read RE - Regular expression operations

Regards,
Dariyoosh

February 24th, 2013, 06:29 AM

dariyoosh

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And if you don't want to use regular expressions for this problem, another solution could be this

Code:

def checkForLetters(p_text):
    l_lettersList = ["a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "y"]
    l_lowerTxt = p_text.lower()
    return (
                l_lowerTxt[0] in l_lettersList and 
                l_lowerTxt[-1] in l_lettersList
            )

Regards,
Dariyoosh

February 24th, 2013, 12:23 PM

Nyktos

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If you're only using it for "in" checks, you should be using a set, not a list.

But yeah, that's the way to do it.

Indexing a string! Help me!

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