Python why doesn't my for-loop affect a list?-CodePudding

I apologize for my english. I have a Python script in which a forloop always deletes the last letter if this string has a special ending.It is a kind of web scraper that should turn the text of a web page into a word list.But when I try to delete the last character of a string it doesn't work and I get this error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/kali/Scripts/Web Scraping/webscraper.py", line 29, in <module>
    if elem[-1] == x:
IndexError: string index out of range

What can I do against it?

My code:

from urllib.request import urlopen
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "https://test-website.com"
html = urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, features="html.parser")

# kill all script and style elements
for script in soup(["script", "style"]):
    script.extract()    # rip it out

# get text
text = soup.get_text()


# break into lines and remove leading and trailing space on each
lines = (line.strip() for line in text.splitlines())
# break multi-headlines into a line each
chunks = (phrase.strip() for line in lines for phrase in line.split("  "))
# drop blank lines
text = '\n'.join(chunk for chunk in chunks if chunk)

sonderzeichen = ["?",".","[","]","{","}","|","#","&","*","/",":",";"," ","-","_","=","<",">","..."]

word_list = text.split()

for elem in list(word_list):
    for x in sonderzeichen:
        if elem[-1] == x:
            elem = elem[:-1:]
            print(elem)
            
print(word_list)

CodePudding user response：

If I understand you correctly, you want to remove all trailing sonderzeichen characters from all words in word_list. If all members of sonderzeichen were single characters, this could be done like this:

word_list = [
    word[:-1] if word[-1] in sonderzeichen else word
    for word in word_list
]

This uses list-comprehension, an inline if-else-statement, and a membership check.

In your question, however, sonderzeichen has "..." - contradicting the name of the variable (German for "special characters"), and the list comprehension would not work with this.