A List of Anagrams

Introduction

Lists are crazy useful. Whether you're planning a party and creating a guest list, going grocery shopping and creating a grocery list, or debating with your friends about the top 10 movies of all time, you likely already do a lot of your thinking in list form.

As a programmer, lists become powerful tools. For example, if you make a guest list on paper and you want to know how many guests you have, you'd need to go back and number all the guests - for a big party like a wedding, that could take a long time. As a programmer, you can use built in list methods to do things like that for you, and to do it in a LOT less time.

Here are a few examples of built-in function Python can complete almost instantly:

• Alphabetize a list.
• Count the items in a list.
• Access (read or write) a specific item in the list.
• Find a certain item and delete it from the list.
• Insert a new item into a list.

The goal

We're going to start by making a list of anagrams of the word "stop". If you can rearrange those four letters to make another word, you've found an anagram! We've already got a partial list of anagrams going, but there are a few errors and a few gaps. Let's go back in and make it better.

The challenges are written out in order in a file called lists.py. Code out your solutions after each challenge in that file, and then run the code to see if it worked.

To test your code, run the command python lists.py in the console.

The trap

A lot of times, it can be tempting to hard-code the answer to simple tasks. AVOID THAT STRATEGY.

Consider this list of numbers:

cool_numbers = [3, 5, 2, 1, 4]

If the instructions asked you to put these numbers in order, you might be tempted to simply go back up and simply rewrite the array:

# DO NOT CODE THIS WAY. IT IS SUPREMELY INEFFICIENT.
cool_numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

If this is the only way you know how to organize, imagine how exhausting your life becomes if you're trying to organize this dataset:

cool_numbers = [
  99, 18, 89, 8, 48, 61, 30, 66, 14, 68, 76, 38, 37, 59, 38, 12, 87, 25, 67, 53, 17, 23, 89,
  45, 43, 99, 96, 21, 35, 79, 88, 63, 91, 15, 58, 5, 73, 58, 13, 41, 77, 84, 31, 22, 57,
  24, 72, 2, 90, 77, 39, 67, 55, 0, 73, 61, 65, 70, 17, 83, 99, 79, 56, 32, 66, 12, 9,
  92, 20, 76, 52, 67, 11, 89, 53, 6, 58, 2, 10, 30, 21, 23, 62, 84, 24, 27, 48, 49, 90,
  18, 76, 78, 20, 88, 80, 21, 59, 52, 83, 12, 40, 77, 53, 78, 88, 49, 93, 39, 21, 42,
  71, 59, 53, 14, 21, 9, 68, 46, 81, 48, 53, 98, 51, 77, 65, 64, 93, 11, 73, 91, 31, 62,
  98, 73, 85, 43, 61, 82, 81, 1, 43, 73, 25, 62, 14, 71, 37, 61, 14, 35, 6, 12, 43, 73,
  4, 39, 76, 79, 13, 78, 7, 19, 61, 58, 30, 10, 84, 84, 3, 51, 33, 10, 15, 3, 44, 45,
  28, 61, 58, 10, 13, 40, 85, 49, 13, 60, 16, 62, 5, 93, 7, 87, 42, 69, 27, 22, 40,
  5, 19, 30
]

Instead, you want to use built-in methods to do your work for you, and then resave that data in the same variable.

cool_numbers = [3, 5, 2, 1, 4]
cool_numbers = cool_numbers.sort() # In other words, sort the numbers in order, and then resave that information back in the same variable.

As you go through this lab, you'll want to refer back to the python documentation on lists. This is where you can learn about other methods like ".sort()" that we used above.