Iterating over word vs. character

[Mark17]

This:

mutants = ['charles xavier',
            'bobby drake',
            'kurt wagner',
            'max eisenhardt',
            'kitty pryde']
for word in mutants:
    print(word)

outputs

charles xavier
bobby drake
kurt wagner
max eisenhardt
kitty pryde

Why does this not iterate one letter as a time vs. one word at a time?

[ndc85430]

I don't really know what else you expect. You're iterating over a list, which means you get each item in that list in turn and those items are strings. If you want to iterate over the characters in each string, then you need another loop to do that.

[TomToad]

You can use the join() method to join all the strings into one.

[buran]

@ndc85430 answered to the WHY question.
You can get the desired output by using itertools.chain or using iterating over elements and then iterating over each element

from itertools import chain

mutants = ['charles xavier',
            'bobby drake',
            'kurt wagner',
            'max eisenhardt',
            'kitty pryde']
for char in chain(*mutants):
    print(char)

#alternative
for name in mutants:
    for char in name:
        print(char)

[Mark17]

I don't really know what else you expect. You're iterating over a list, which means you get each item in that list in turn and those items are strings. If you want to iterate over the characters in each string, then you need another loop to do that.

That makes total sense. Thanks!

I'm learning Python through online classes. I get short videos on all kinds of different topics with exercises aimed to test the specific material. I don't get a lot of unifying material aimed at pulling things together and exposing some of these nuances that make all the difference.

[ndc85430]

I guess it's good you're asking these questions then, but what I'd also urge you to do at this stage is to solve a lot of programming problems so you can start to work these things out. Codewars is good for this and they have different levels of problems.

[Mark17]

I guess it's good you're asking these questions then, but what I'd also urge you to do at this stage is to solve a lot of programming problems so you can start to work these things out. Codewars is good for this and they have different levels of problems.

I'll check that out. Thanks!