I'm currently learning Python as I'm taking a data mining class. I was making a for-loop to make a noisy data file to do smoothing and I found a peculiarity on Python for-loop that I couldn't understand nor go around.
So I made this simple testing C++ and Python codes. C++ one works, but Python one doesn't.
The reason is that C++ allows arbitrary updates on the counter variable i within the for-loop block, but Python doesn't.
On Python code, I try to update i arbitrarily by doing i += 1
within the while-loop, but if you look at the outputs for At the first part of the loop, i = SOMETHING
, Python is arbitrarily updating the i only in the while-loop that's in the for-loop, but then reverts the value back when it exits that while-loop. (Outputs are in the comments at the bottom)
Why is that? Is it a scope issue? (Both C++ and Python are statically scoped) Is it because of their types? (I'm only familiar with statically-typed languages like C++ and Java, and not dynamically-typed languages like Python)
On Python, it seems like the for-loop is actually a function with return-by-value parameter i which ignores all the changes on the parameter that took place inside the function.
I tried:
- Setting the counter i as a global variable.
- using
range(0, len(input), *variable*)
, but I still failed to replicate it. - Researched if it can be solved by using Static variable or similar sort on Python (I think it's irrelevant?)
On Python, how would you replicate this C++ code? Could you enlighten me on why those for-loops behave differently? Thank you.
This is C++ code that's working correctly:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string input = "abc defg";
string eachWord = "";
for(int i = 0; i < input.length(); i++)
{
cout << "At the first part of the loop, i = " << i << " ." << endl;
while(input[i] != ' ' && input[i] != '\0')
{
eachWord += input[i];
i++;
}
cout << eachWord << endl;
cout << "At the last part of the loop, i = " << i << " ." << endl << endl;
eachWord = "";
}
}
/*
Output:
At the first part of the loop, i = 0 .
abc
At the last part of the loop, i = 3 .
At the first part of the loop, i = 4 .
defg
At the last part of the loop, i = 8 .
*/
And this is the Python code that's not working correctly, that I tried to make to replicate the C++ code:
input = "abc defg"
eachWord = ''
for i in range(len(input)):
print("At the first part of the loop, i = ", i, ".")
while(input[i] != ' ' and input[i] != '\0'):
eachWord += input[i]
i += 1
print(eachWord)
print("At the last part of the loop, i = ", i, ".")
print()
eachWord = ''
"""
Output:
At the first part of the loop, i = 0 .
abc
At the last part of the loop, i = 3 .
At the first part of the loop, i = 1 .
bc
At the last part of the loop, i = 3 .
At the first part of the loop, i = 2 .
c
At the last part of the loop, i = 3 .
At the first part of the loop, i = 3 .
At the last part of the loop, i = 3 .
At the first part of the loop, i = 4 .
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "main.py", line 6, in <module>
while(input[i] != ' ' and input[i] != '\0'):
IndexError: string index out of range
"""
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