Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Python Introducing Lists Using Lists Continental

Posted by Jacob Hein
Jacob Hein
13,755 Points

I don't understand how to extract items in a list by first letter to display

The second part of the challenge says to now display all of the continents that start with the letter 'A'. I tried to index all of those continents and print using:

for continent in continent: print("* " + continent[0, 3, 5, 6])

continents.py 
continents = [
    'Asia',
    'South America',
    'North America',
    'Africa',
    'Europe',
    'Antarctica',
    'Australia',
]
# Your code here

for continent in continents:
    print("* " + continent)
    print(

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,236 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,236 Points

Your "print" statement is fine as it was. You can add a conditional ("if") statement before it to control which items it runs for.

In the conditional expression of the "if", you can test the first character of "continent" to see if it is "A". The first character of a string can be accessed by indexing (with brackets []) using the value zero.

I'll bet you can get it now, but if you still have trouble you might want to look at some of the answers given to other questions about this same exercise.