Python: Censoring a word in text but last word does not censor

Question

I am doing Python on Codecademy trying to censor out a word in a text. The code works but if the last word in the text has the word, it will not be censored.

I believe the for statement needs altering such as for x in (text + 1) but of course that causes an error. We are not to use built-in functions such as replace() Any ideas?

def censor(text,word):
    text = text.split()
    for x in text:
        if x == word:
            text[text.index(x)] = "*" * len(word)
    return " ".join(text)

print(censor("You dirty guy and dirty boy dirty.", "dirty"))

This returns [You ***** guy and ***** boy dirty.]

Answer 1

It's probably including the full stop in the last token, so it is comparing "dirty." with "dirty".

Answer 2

The last occurrence of dirty is 'dirty.' instead of 'dirty'. It might be easier to use the replace function:

def censor(text,word):
    return text.replace(word, len(word)*'*')

Without built-in functions:

def censor(text,word):
    while 1:
        wordPosition = text.find(word)
        if wordPosition < 0:
            break
        text = text[:wordPosition] + len(word)*'*' + text[wordPosition+len(word):]
    return text

Answer 3

Christopher is correct that it's comparing dirty to dirty. with a period. As you said you cannot use replace function, so you could change your if statement to be

if x.startswith(word) == True:

Answer 4

That's due to the last dirty having . so thus, there's difference between dirty and dirty(.). Here is a way to tackle the problem :

def censor(text, word):
    wordlist = text.split()
    new_words_list = []
    for item in wordlist:
        if item.find(word) > -1:
            new_words_list.append( '*' * len(word))
        else:
            new_words_list.append(item)
    return " ".join(new_words_list)

print(censor("You dirty guy and dirty boy dirty.", "dirty"))

Output:

You ***** guy and ***** boy *****

Answer 5

You can use re.sub to replace the work from text

import re
re.sub("word", "new_replaced_word", text)