仅打印包含其他列表中字符的列表中的单词？

Question

I am working on a small problem for fun, sent to me by a friend. The problem requires me to populate an array with common words from a text file, and then print all the words from this list containing certain characters provided by the user. I am able to populate my array no problem, but it seems the part of the code that actually compares the two lists is not working. Below is the function I've written to compare the 2 lists.

#Function that prompts user for the set of letters to match and then compares that list of letters to each word in our wordList.
def getLetters():
    #Prompt user for list of letters and convert that string into a list of characters
    string = input("Enter your target letters: ")
    letterList = list(string)
    #For each word in the wordList, loop through each character in the word and check to see if the character is in our letter list, if it is increase matchCount by 1.
    for word in wordList:
        matchCount = 0
        for char in word:
            if char in letterList:
                matchCount+=1
            #If matchCount is equal to the length of the word, all of the characters in the word are present in our letter list and the word should be added to our matchList.
            if matchCount == len(word):
                matchList.append(word)
    print(matchList)

The code runs just fine, I don't get any error output, but once the user enters their list of letters, nothing happens. To test I've tried a few inputs matching up with words I know are in my wordList (eg added, axe, tree, etc). But nothing ever prints after I enter my letter string.

This is how I populate my wordList:

def readWords(filename):
    try:
        with open(filename) as file:
            #Load entire file as string, split string into word list using whitespace as delimiter
            s = file.read()
            wordList = s.split(" ")
            getLetters()
    #Error handling for invalid filename. Just prompts the user for filename again. Should change to use ospath.exists. But does the job for now
    except FileNotFoundError:
        print("File does not exist, check directory and try again. Dictionary file must be in program directory because I am bad and am not using ospath.")
        getFile()

Edit: Changed the function to reset matchCount to 0 before it starts looping characters, still no output.

Answer 1

Edit: add a global declaration to modify your list from inside a function:

wordList = [] #['axe', 'tree', 'etc']
def readWords(filename):
    try:
        with open(filename) as file:
            s = file.read()
            global wordList  # must add to modify global list
            wordList = s.split(" ")
    except:
        pass

Here is a working example:

wordList = ['axe', 'tree', 'etc']


# Function that prompts user for the set of letters to match and then compares that list of letters to each word in our wordList.
def getLetters():
    # Prompt user for list of letters and convert that string into a list of characters
    string = input("Enter your target letters: ")
    letterList = list(string)
    # For each word in the wordList, loop through each character in the word and check to see if the character is in our letter list, if it is increase matchCount by 1.
    matchList = []
    for word in wordList:
        matchCount = 0
        for char in word:
            if char in letterList:
                matchCount += 1
            # If matchCount is equal to the length of the word, all of the characters in the word are present in our letter list and the word should be added to our matchList.
            if matchCount == len(word):
                matchList.append(word)
    print(matchList)

getLetters()

output:

Enter your target letters: xae
['axe']

Answer 2

Your code only needs a simple change:

Pass wordList as a parameter for getLetters . Also if you like you could make a change in order to know if all the letters of the word are in the letter list.

def getLetters(wordList):
    string = input("Enter your target letters: ")
    letterList = list(string)
    matchList = []
    for word in wordList:
        if all([letter in letterList for letter in word]):
            matchList.append(word)
    return matchList

And in readWords :

def readWords(filename):
    try:
        with open(filename) as file:
            s = file.read()
            wordList = s.split(" ")
            result = getLetters(wordList)
    except FileNotFoundError:
        print("...")
    else:
        # No exceptions.
        return result