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Asked: 2024-09-27T11:17:25+05:30 In:

How to Implement a Color-Coded Word Guessing Game in Python?

I recently stumbled upon a fun challenge that involves guessing a five-letter word, similar to Wordle, but with a twist involving color coding. The goal is to highlight letters based on whether they are in the correct position (let’s say green) or just exist in the word but are in the wrong position (we’ll call this yellow). If the letter isn’t in the word at all, it gets no highlight.

So, here’s the deal: imagine you have a few guesses at a secret word, with each guess being both a number of letters and a color-coded hint about how close you are to the right answer. For example, if your guess is “plant” and the secret word is “apple,” you’d highlight ‘p’ (green) since it’s the first letter and in the right place, and ‘a’ (yellow) since it’s in the word but in the wrong place. The other letters get no highlights.

Now, here’s where I’m hoping to get some help from you all. I’d love to know how you’d approach this problem. I’m thinking of a way to create a function or a piece of code that takes in a guess and the secret word, then returns a string showing the letters with their correct color coding.

Here’s a little more context to make it interesting: Let’s say you can have as many guesses as you want, but you only get one shot at the secret word. Also, let’s spice things up a bit—what if for every guess, you have to output this in a compact way, perhaps using some sort of abbreviation for colors (like ‘G’ for green, ‘Y’ for yellow)?

How would you structure this? Would you use arrays, loops, or something else in your logic? What edge cases do you think are important to handle? I’d love to hear any snippets of code or pseudocode you come up with or even just your thought process on how you’d tackle this! Let’s make this a fun coding puzzle to solve together!

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    2 Answers

    1. Word Guessing Game

      Here’s a fun way to guess the secret word!


    2. To tackle the problem of color-coded letter guessing similar to Wordle, you can create a function that processes both the guess and the secret word to determine the correct color coding for each letter. I would suggest using arrays to store the letters of the guess and the secret word, along with a result array that will be used to keep track of the color codes. The logic would involve iterating over the indexed positions of both words to first identify the greens (correct letters in the correct position) and then the yellows (correct letters in the wrong position), while ensuring that once a letter is identified as green, it is not considered for yellow coding. The output can be formatted as a string where ‘G’ denotes green and ‘Y’ denotes yellow for concise results.

      Here’s a sample implementation in Python:

              def color_coded_guess(guess, secret):
            result = [''] * len(guess)
            secret_list = list(secret)  # Convert secret word to a list for manipulation
            
            # First pass for greens
            for i in range(len(guess)):
                if guess[i] == secret[i]:
                    result[i] = 'G'
                    secret_list[i] = None  # Mark this letter as used
            
            # Second pass for yellows
            for i in range(len(guess)):
                if result[i] != 'G' and guess[i] in secret_list:
                    result[i] = 'Y'
                    secret_list[secret_list.index(guess[i])] = None  # Mark this letter as used
            
            return ''.join(result)

        # Example usage:
        print(color_coded_guess("plant", "apple"))  # Output: "GYY--"

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