Stuck on this one

Hi Kade,

I approached this one in a similar way to your code.

I started by passing in two iterable parameters, rather than hard-coding the parameters but I doubt the challenge minds but the hard-coded method does make it fiddly to access each iterable.

Inside the method, I initialised a blank list, I called it output but that's open for renaming!

Next, because I wanted to access the iterables using their index, as you did, I set up a for loop with a true counter variable that's a number. There are issues with the for in approach which I'll briefly discuss. Take the other suggested solution here:

for item in first_seq:
  # do something with index & square brackets

That won't work. At each iteration, the value held at each element is contained, in turn, within item. So, you get 1 then 2 etc - these aren't counters; they're the values in the iterable. They could be anything depending on what's passed in. It doesn't use an index approach to accessing the iterable; for starters, the first iterable doesn't start with zero so accessing using [] would fail. The method is supposed to take any iterable, not just [1, 2, 3] so the method must be able to cope with that. To adopt the approach you've decided on, you need to have the counter variable counting and then access each iterable using [counter] or [i], or whatever you choose.

To do this you need to make the for loop run on numbers. Because the iterables are both of the same length we can use that to our advantage. Loop through from zero to the length of the iterable and the loop variable (let's call it i) will count and not hold the values in the iterable.

That could look like:

for i in range(0, len(iter1)):

The variable iter1 is one of the parameters passed in to the method like this:

def combo(iter1, iter2):

So iter1 and iter2 are the same length and can contain the example contents suggested in the challenge, or anything else we choose.

Using the for loop in this way loops through a range object which is a range of numbers between the two parameters passed in. The first parameter is zero (the starting index number of the iterable) and the second is the length of iter1. This will generate a sequence of counter values allowing you to use square brackets to access each element of both, indeed any, iterables.

At the each loop, access iter1[i] and iter2[i] to access the relevant parts of each parameter. turn them into a tuple and add that to the blank list you started the method with. I called it output, remember? To make the tuple, surround the above two iterable accessors with parentheses and separate them with a comma. Also, remember that items in a list are also separated by commas, and that's what we're returning; a list. So, include a comma after the closing parenthesis. Just add that to the output list with +=.

Once the loop has finished, return output.

That all looks like this - which is my solution and by no means the only way to do this:

def combo(iter1, iter2):
    output = []
    for i in range(0, len(iter1)):
        output += (iter1[i], iter2[i]),
    return output

I hope that works for you and you understand my ramblings!

Steve.