Exercise 2 hints

Here are a few things that may be helpful in completing Exercise 2.

Where to make changes

In Problem 1 lines 32-34 and line 40 should not be modified.

List methods

In Problem 2 you will likely need two lists and to use the .index() method. These were covered in this week’s lesson.

Indentation woes

We have not really run into this problem in the lessons, but Python codes are sensitive to how much you indent the start of each line. This is perhaps easiest to see with an example.

name = 'Dave'
    dogs = 0
print('My name is', name, 'and I own', dogs, 'dogs.')

If you copy and paste this code into the Spyder editor and run it, you will see that is gives an IndentationError. Spyder already makes it clear there is an error in the program by showing a yellow exclamation mark icon on the problem line.

    dogs = 0
    ^
IndentationError: unexpected indent

We will see examples later of why indentation matters, but for now just be sure you don’t indent lines to different levels. Thus, the fix is simply to remove the spaces on the second line.

name = 'Dave'
dogs = 0
print('My name is', name, 'and I own', dogs, 'dogs.')

Now, running the code results in the expected output.

My name is Dave and I own 0 dogs.