Python skipping my if statement

Question

For some reason, this code doesn't work:

def pyglatin(word):
    output = ""
    wordlenedit = len(word)-1
    wordlen = len(word)
    fixer = 0
    while fixer == 0:
        for i in word:
            if i == 'a' or i == 'e' or i == 'o' or i == 'i' or i == 'u':
                fixer = 1
            else:
                wordlenedit -= 1
    else:
        output = word[wordlenedit:wordlen:1] + '-' + word[0:wordlenedit:1] + 'ay'
        return output

To see the issues, click here . The problem appears to be that it's skipping the if statement that identifies vowels, but I'm not sure why. This results in some very odd outputs.

Answer 1

Your function does not work because you walk through the word, decrementing the splitting index for each consonant you encounter, starting at wordlenedit = len(word)-1 .

At the end of your for loop, wordlenedit is equal to (length of the word) - 1 - (number of consonants) . The function will only work if the first index of vowel in the word (starting at 0) is equal to the number of vowels - 1.

Also, the while loop is useless here, as you walk through the entire word in the for loop. It is even worse than that: the while loop will be an infinite loop if you have a word with no vowels (like "fly", as you don't check the "y")

This is a corrected version of your function, using the keyword break :

def pyglatin2(word):
    output = ""
    wordlenedit = 0
    wordlen = len(word)
    for l in word:
        if l == 'a' or l == 'e' or l == 'o' or l == 'i' or l == 'u':
            break
        else:
            wordlenedit += 1

    output = word[wordlenedit:wordlen:1] + '-' + word[0:wordlenedit:1] + 'ay'
    return output

However this function can be written in a much more concise/simple way, using Regular Expressions , like this:

import re
def pyglatin3(word):
    # Get the first index of one of these: a, e, i, o, u
    start = re.search("[aeiou]", word).start()

    # Split the word
    return word[start:] + "-" + word[0:start] + "ay"

Answer 2

If you want to do this without using regular expressions, the simplest way is to use enumerate :

def pyglatin(word):
    for i, ch in enumerate(word):
        if ch in 'aeiou':
            return word[i:] + '-' + word[:i] + 'ay'