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Python Python Collections (2016, retired 2019) Lists Disemvowel

Posted by Andrew McLane
Andrew McLane
3,385 Points

how to stop the while loop

So I added a while loop so that the loop could run for words that had multiple vowels, and multiple of the same vowels. However, I can't figure out to to get the loop to stop once all the vowels are deleted.

disemvowel.py 
def disemvowel(word):

    while True:
        try:

            word.remove("a")
            word.remove("e")
            word.remove("i")
            word.remove("o")
            word.remove("u")
            word.remove("A")
            word.remove("E")
            word.remove("I")
            word.remove("O")
            word.remove("U")
        except ValueError:
            pass
        return word

2 Answers

jonlunsford
jonlunsford
15,480 Points
jonlunsford
jonlunsford
15,480 Points

The python 'break' statement is used to break out of a loop. Or you could use a boolean value outside of the loop like this.

keepLooping = True
while keepLooping:
# Loop statements here
keepLooping = False
Andrew McLane
Andrew McLane
3,385 Points

right, I would use a break statement at the end, but how do I ensure that the loop ran enough times to delete all instances of a vowel in a word before I break?

jonlunsford
jonlunsford
15,480 Points
jonlunsford
jonlunsford
15,480 Points

Andrew: The way you are going about this is awkward. For one, you are jumping into a loop instead of looping through the list. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the value passed in is a string. So, here is how I would solve that part.

def disemvowel(word):
# put the vowels that will be removed into a list
vowels = ['a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u', 'A', 'E', 'I', 'O', 'U']
# then convert the string into a list
word = list(word)
# loop through each vowel and remove it from the word
for letter in vowels:
try:
word.remove(letter)
except ValueError:
continue
# then you need to rejoin the remaining word list back into a string before you return it
return ''.join(word)

NOTE: that this code will only remove the first letter found in the word. In other words, if a word contains more than one 'a', then one will still remain. To solve this I added a second word.remove(letter) statement below the first to remove duplicate.