Python error: "IndexError: string index out of range"

Question

I'm currently learning python from a book called 'Python for the absolute beginner (third edition)'. There is an exercise in the book which outlines code for a hangman game. I followed along with this code however I keep getting back an error in the middle of the program.

Here is the code that is causing the problem:

if guess in word:
    print("\nYes!", guess, "is in the word!")

    # Create a new variable (so_far) to contain the guess
    new = ""
    i = 0
    for i in range(len(word)):
        if guess == word[i]:
            new += guess
        else:
            new += so_far[i]
        so_far = new

This is also the error it returns:

new += so_far[i]
IndexError: string index out of range

Could someone help me out with what is going wrong and what I can do to fix it?

edit: I initialised the so_far variable like so:

so_far = "-" * len(word)

Answer 1

It looks like you indented so_far = new too much. Try this:

if guess in word:
    print("\nYes!", guess, "is in the word!")

    # Create a new variable (so_far) to contain the guess
    new = ""
    i = 0
    for i in range(len(word)):
        if guess == word[i]:
            new += guess
        else:
            new += so_far[i]
    so_far = new # unindented this