Trying to get the first letter of every word in a list

[deanhystad]

Getting back to the original post question, index() will not work because you can have repeating letters. You could use enumerate to iterate through the user text.

def initialise(userText):
    firstLetters = userText[0]
    for index, letter in enumerate(userText):
        if letter == " ":
            firstLetters += userText[index+1]
    return firstLetters

A problem with this approach is it assumes the next letter after a space is the start of a word. This fails for us older folks who follow a period with two spaces, and it would crash if you entered a trailing space.

A safer solution is to set a flag to let you know that you are in a break and looking for the start of the next word.

def initialise(userText):
    punctuation = ' .,:;()"'
    firstLetters = ''
    start = True
    for letter in userText:
        if letter in punctuation:
            start = True
        elif start:
            firstLetters += letter
            start = False
    return firstLetters
 
print(initialise('This is a test.  It works for (some) punctuaton.'))