So I am stuck with this problem I need to solve this question: given a word and a pattern, I need to write function that return true if the word matches the pattern. The pattern looks like: "______" for example: the word "apple" will be represented as "a _ _ l " or " _ _ _ " or " p p _ e", etc... The conditions are:

1. The word needs to contain the exact characters revealed (=not "_") at the same index as in the pattern
2. the revealed characters in the pattern can't appear in other place in the word other than the same index

for example: given the pattern "d _ _ _ _ a _ _ _ _" for the word "delegating" return True for the word "dishwasher" return True for the word "derogation" return True

I wrote this code:

def check_exact_locations(word, pattern):
word_list = list(word)
pattern_list = list(pattern)
for i in range(len(word_list)):
    if word_list[i] in pattern:
        for j in range(1, len(pattern_list)):
            if pattern_list[j] != "_":
                if pattern_list[j] != pattern_list[j-1]:
                    if word_list[i] == pattern_list[j] and i != j:
                        return False
return True

I can't import any module so I pretty much need to use python's basics

CodePudding user response：

You should be able to do this just by iterating over once and returning False when you find something that doesn't match:

def check_exact_loactions(word, pattern):
    if len(word) != len(pattern):
        return False
    for w, p in zip(word, pattern):
        if p != '_' and w != p:
            return False
    return True

(Edited with @Tomerikoo's suggestion)