Why do we change secret_word to a list before getting its length + other questions

Question

We did

len(good_guesses) != len(list(secret_word))

where good_guesses is a list and secret_word is a string. Was changing it to a list necessary?

We also did this

 while len(bad_guesses) < 7 and len(good_guesses) != len(list(secret_word)):

but I dont think the second part was necessary. because if the lengths equal each other our while loop would automatically break when we do almost exactly the same thing near the end of the code. I think kenneth just needed a way to introduce the keyword and to us

Lastly. when i guess all the correct letters, the win message that is supposed to be printed near the end of the code never gets run. i dont know why this is happening

Code from the video:

import random

# make a list of words
words = [
    'apple',
    'banana',
    'orange',
    'coconut',
    'strawberry',
    'lime',
    'grapefruit',
    'lemon',
    'kumquat',
    'blueberry',
    'melon'
]

while True:
    start = input("Press enter/return to start, or enter Q to quit")
    if start.lower() =='q':
        break

    # pick a random word
    secret_word = random.choice(words)
    bad_guesses = []
    good_guesses = []

    while len(bad_guesses) < 7 and len(good_guesses) != len(list(secret_word)):
        # draw guessed letters, spaces and strikes
        for letter in secret_word:
            if letter in good_guesses:
                print(letter, end='')
            else:
                print('_', end='')

        print('')
        print('Strikes: {}/7'.format(len(bad_guesses)))  
        print('')

        # take guess
        guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()

        if len(guess) != 1:
            print("You can only guess a single letter!")
            continue
        elif guess in bad_guesses or guess in good_guesses:
            print("You've already guessed that letter!")
            continue
        elif not guess.isalpha():
            print("You can only guess letters!") 
            continue

        if guess in secret_word:
            good_guesses.append(guess)
            if len(good_guesses) == len(list(secret_word)):  # would automatically break here 
                print("You win! The word was {}".format(secret_word))
                break
        else:
            bad_guesses.append(guess)

    else:
        print("You didn't guess it! My secret word was {}".format(secret_word))

Answer 1 · 2015-12-28T00:13:30Z

December 28, 2015 12:13am

For any string, len(string) == len(list(string)), so it's not clear why the string is converted to a list.

On your second point, I also can not think of a scenario where the second condition in the while would be trigger since, as you say, the same condition would be caught inside the loop and cause a break before the while loop circles back again:

    while len(bad_guesses) < 7 and len(good_guesses) != len(list(secret_word)):
    # ...
        if guess in secret_word:
            good_guesses.append(guess)
            if len(good_guesses) == len(list(secret_word)):  # would automatically break here 
                print("You win! The word was {}".format(secret_word))
                break

As for why the print "You win!" not happening, it seems that if the secret_word has a repeating letter, then the number of good_guesses could never be the same as the number of letters in secret_word.

A better architecture of the solution would be to make a set out of the secret_word characters. Then the good_guess length would match the set length at game completion.

In fact, the game fails to recognize a win on a word when there is a repeated letter.

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