comparing a list to a tuple, python 3.x - having problems getting the correct position to print

Question

I'm a new programmer and I'm having a difficult time finishing up my 4th program. The premise was to create a program that would take input from the user, creating a list then compares this list to a tuple. After it prints a statement letting the user know which items they chose correspond to the items in the tuple and also in which position they are in the tuple.

The problem I'm having is the last part, I can't get the correct position to print right and I fail to understand why. For example, if someone chose GPS correctly during their guesses, it should print position 0, but it doesn't. If water is chosen, it says it's in position 13...but it should be 5.

#here is the code I have so far:

number_items_input = 0
guessed_inventory_list = [] #this is the variable list that will be input by user

survival_gear = () #this is the tuple that will be compared against
survival_gear = ("GPS","map","compass","firstaid","water","flashlight","lighter","blanket","rope","cell phone","signal mirror")


#block bellow takes input from the user
print("Please choose one by one, which top 10 items do you want with you in case of a survival situation, think Bear Grylls. Once chosen, your list will be compared to the top 10 survival items list.")
while number_items_input < 10:
    print("Please choose.")
    guessed_items = input()
    guessed_inventory_list.append(guessed_items)
    number_items_input = number_items_input + 1

print ("You have chosen the following:", guessed_inventory_list)


#block of code below here compares the input to the tuple    
t = 1
while t < 1:
    t = t + 1


for individual_items in guessed_inventory_list:

    for top_items in survival_gear:
        if individual_items == top_items:
            #finally the print statements below advise the user if they guessed an item and which position it's in.
            print ("You have chosen wisely", top_items)
            print ("It's in position", t, "on the survival list")
    t = t + 1

Answer 1

The reason you are getting a wrong index is because of the wrong nesting of loops , your outer loop should be the tuple you wish to compare and the inner loop should be the list generated from the input where as in this case it is reverse, see the below corrected code snippet
Code snippet:

for top_items in survival_gear:
    for individual_items in guessed_inventory_list:
        if individual_items == top_items:
            #finally the print statements below advise the user if they guessed an item and  which position it's in.
            print ("You have chosen wisely", top_items)
            print ("It's in position", t, "on the survival list")
    t = t + 1

The above code snippet should solve your problem , but your code contains

• while loop which can be avoided using the range built in function

• Incrementing the variable t manually can be avoided by using enumerate built in function

• The nested forloop and if loop can be replaced by using the "in" membership test operator

Find the below updated code:

#!/usr/bin/python
number_items_input = 0
guessed_inventory_list = [] #this is the variable list that will be input by user

survival_gear = ("GPS","map","compass","firstaid","water","flashlight","lighter","blanket","rope","cell phone","signal mirror")

#block bellow takes input from the user
print("Please choose one by one, which top 10 items do you want with you in caseof a survival situation, think Bear Grylls.Once chosen, your list will be compared to the top 10 survival items list.")

# One can use range functions to loop n times in this case 10 times
for i in range(0,10):
    guessed_items = raw_input("Please choose:")
    guessed_inventory_list.append(guessed_items)

print ("You have chosen the following:", guessed_inventory_list)

# Enumerate is one of the built-in Python functions. 
# It returns an enumerate object. 
# In this case that object is a list of tuples (immutable lists), 
# each containing a pair of count/index and value.
# like [(1, 'GPS'), (2, 'map'), (3, 'compass'),...,(6, 'signal mirror')]
# in the below for loop the list of tuple will be 
#unpacked in to t and individual_items for each iteration
for t,individual_items in enumerate(survival_gear,start=1):
    #the "in" is a membership test operator which will test whether
    #individual_items is in list guessed_inventory_list
    if individual_items in guessed_inventory_list:
       #finally the print statements below advise the user if they guessed an item and which position it's in.
       print("You have chosen wisely", individual_items)
       print("It's in position", t, "on the survival list")