How would I create a function essentially to single out only the a specific character for each element of the provided string logic I'm looking for:

ex. in a list of elements like:

countries_and_capitals = (
    ['Afghanistan', 'Kabul'], ['Albania', 'Tirana (Tirane)'], ['Algeria', 'Algiers'], ['Andorra', 'Andorra la Vella'],
    ['Angola', 'Luanda'], ['Antigua and Barbuda', "Saint John's"], ['Argentina', 'Buenos Aires'],
    ['Armenia', 'Yerevan'])

How could i create a logic to only display the elements that have the same First Letter for both Capital And Country ex. Algeria, Algiers.

CodePudding user response：

If only use the First letter to determine matching, it'll probably be too loose and select some more as the results. For example: South Korea - Seoul; or Belgium to Brussels. Not sure this is desirable? even it meets the initial requirement.

So to make this function more adaptable - this just makes the matching criteria as one character as default, but can be changed to select more characters if that's desirable later.

def find_same_name(lst, matching=1):
    '''
    find all matching capitals with Coutries, minimum matching is One char.
    '''

    # list comprehension

    return [sub  for sub in lst      
                 if sub[0][:matching] == sub[1][:matching]] # can determine matched req. 

  

Running it:

print(find_same_name(countries_and_capitals))

Output:

[['Algeria', 'Algiers'], ['Andorra', 'Andorra la Vella']]

CodePudding user response：

Try this:

new_list = []

for sublist in countries_and_capitals:

    if sublist[0][0] == sublist[1][0]:

        new_list.append(sublist)

And you'll get:

new_list

[['Algeria', 'Algiers'], ['Andorra', 'Andorra la Vella']]

CodePudding user response：

You can index the first character in a string using [] brackets

string = "ABC"

print(string[0]) # Will print first character in the string