WTH? What am I missing?

I just recently got back into programming with python, and am completely confounded.

What is wrong with this code? Am I missing something absolutely obvious?



Whenever I run this code, I get:

i equals "ten"
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Documents and Settings\JohnnyFive\Desktop\test.py", line 4, in ?
print word[i]
TypeError: list indices must be integers

Thie prints are there for debugging purposes. WTH am I doing wrong?

It seems that python is filling the "i" variable with the actual value of word[i], instead of the number. Is it a bug? I've checked a million different ways, including two computers and three python installs. It's gotta be something simple, but I can't figure out what!

**Edit** This doesn't really show what i'm trying to accomplish, but I figure it is rather obvious. I tore this out of a script i'm writing for Xchat that was causing me problems.

Basically I get passed a list that has several channel names on it, and I want to create a variable with the list index of the last channel name in the list. Thanks in advance!

Your right, in your code i is being assigned the value of word for each iteration though the list.

Generally if you wanted to iterate though a sequence by index rather than it's value you would use the range() or enumerate() functions, depending on your needs i.e.



Hopefully this will help you figure out whats going wrong with your program , and how to fix it. If you get stuck just ask.

Edit: Colours thanks to Grims Syntax program.

Mark.

Thank you very much for your help. Looking at it now I understand that it really was me... I thought I had a bugged python or something.

And with your examples have figured out how to do what I want several ways, and it works.

Although, I have a question that I hope you can explain.

While:


works and prints the index correctly. The following, however, prints the index and index value in a list:

And I do not understand why. I assume it has something to do with the way enumerate works, and the iteration, but reading the python docs on enumerate() it isn't completely clear how it works. Thanks in advance

Right again, your getting pretty good at this . This happens because enumerate returns a tuple of two vakyes (index, value) which you then unpack into the variables in the for loop . So if you have only one variable the tuple is assigned to it, if you have two variables then Python assigns each part of the tuple to those variables .

Mark.