Comparing words in 2 different list in python and replacing the found words with "*" in output

Question

I am trying to bleep the message that the user gives as input , as if the input is "what the heck" where "heck" is present in list of banned words in a file called "banned.txt" so that the output becomes "what the ****" .

i am a newbie to python and till now I've made two list out of the passed input as well as the list in which banned words are present , i am having trouble comparing the words in these two list , can someone explain me how to solve this problem.

from cs50 import get_string
import sys


def main():
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        print("Usage: python bleep.py dictionary")
        exit(1)

    print("What message would you like to censor?")
    msg=get_string()

    infile=open(sys.argv[1],'r')
    bannedwords=[infile.read().split("\n")]
    userwords=[msg.split(" ")]
    for uword in userwords:
        for bword in bannedwords:
            if(uword==bword)
            #do something.....but its not comparing words 



if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Input: what the heck
Expected-Output: what the ****

Answer 1

Instead of splitting your msg int a list, search it for the banned word.

for word in bannedwords:
    if word in msg:
        new_word = "*" * len(word)
        new_msg = msg.replace(word, new_word)

if you would like to test it directly use this:

bannedwords = ["banned", "other"]

msg = "the next word is banned"

new_msg = ""

for word in bannedwords:
    if word in msg:
        new_word = "*" * len(word)
        new_msg = msg.replace(word, new_word)

print(new_msg)

Answer 2

Your problem is in the lines:

bannedwords=[infile.read().split("\n")]
userwords=[msg.split(" ")]

The split command already puts the words into an array, so you're wrapping them in two arrays, getting:

[['heck', '']]
[['what', 'the', 'heck']]

as the list of banned words, and the list of words from the message respectively.

Remove the [] from the definitions and use:

bannedwords=infile.read().split("\n")
userwords=msg.split(" ")

and your code should work as you wanted. You could also just check if each word is in the list of banned words, for example:

bannedwords=infile.read().split("\n")
userwords=msg.split(" ")

for uword in userwords:
    # An easier way to check if the word is banned.
    if(uword in bannedwords):
        # If it's banned, print one * for each letter in the word.
        print("*" * len(uword))
    else:
        print(uword)

with input of 'what the heck' gives an output of:

what
the
****

Answer 3

The following solution may work for you. This also removes punctuations from the end of the msg string while replacing bannedwords in msg with '*':

from string import punctuation
bannedwords = ["heck", "darn"]
msg = input("What message would you like to censor?: ")
for word in msg.rstrip(punctuation).split(' '):
    if word in bannedwords:
        new_word = '*' * len(word)
        msg = msg.replace(word, new_word)
print(msg)

#Output:
What message would you like to censor?: What the heck?
What the ****?

#Another attempt:
What message would you like to censor?: darn it!
**** it!