🔒 Problem with associating index and value (today's leetcode challenge)

[hollow wind]

I've now tried a few times to check a value and then do something with its index in a function.

Challenge:
A fancy string is a string where no three consecutive characters are equal.

Given a string s, delete the minimum possible number of characters from s to make it fancy.

s = "leeetcode"

def fun():
    for i, c in enumerate(s):
        if c = c+1 = c+2:
            remove()

I can't seem to properly digest how to correctly reference the index. I still have trouble with data structures. I need more exercises like this to get a feeling for it, have some repetition.

Is there some good way to remember how to do this thing, a good analogy maybe?

[woven phoenix]

@hollow wind

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[uncut pewter]

Index is i in your case. You can still do s[i] and stuff.

Tbh it's one of the cases where I'd ditch "proper" for-each loops using enumerate and just loop over range(len(s)).

Because unless you know smart way of index-less iterating over several elements, you just easily get confused as to what i and c are, as shown here

[hollow wind]

i know the code is incorrect but doing i = i+1 = i+2 will give me the indexes

[uncut pewter]

Also don't actually remove stuff from things you iterate over - instead, make a new one with elements (here: letters) to keep

[hollow wind]

so its jsut 1, 2, 3 in that case

so the case will never happen

[uncut pewter]

I never said to do "i = i+1..." I literally said to use s[i]

[hollow wind]

thats definitely something ill be doing

i know, its the reason why i did c instead

[uncut pewter]

So s[i]==s[i+1]==s[i+2]

[ancient cedar]

the right way of writing what you were thinking would be ```py
for index, character in enumerate(string):
if string[index] == string[index + 1] == string[index + 2]:
...

[uncut pewter]

^Yeah, that's why I said to use range. It's one of those cases where enumerate just makes it more confusing and causes index errors...

[hollow wind]

i have a hard time seeing a variable or a table or array (like that) and understand what it'll actually represent

[ancient cedar]

(in first place, string[index + n] will error for the last n characters as you're trying to index beyond the string length)

[hollow wind]

in case of s[1] it'll give me the character

so e

i should start logging more

[uncut pewter]

Uh, so you never operated on lists or anything like that?

[hollow wind]

i did but its still all so unusual to work with

(not even a week into learning this as my first programming language)

[ancient cedar]

I recommend creating a new list and appending characters you want to keep, instead of trying to remove characters from an existing list/string

[hollow wind]

so might just be the little time I've spent and it'll become more obvious and more natural to me

[vale dust]

This is a very common pattern you'll see quite often

[woven phoenix]

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