Compare Characters

00:00 Now I want to compare these, do something like if first is different from second

00:08 or first is different from third, and so on. But I think I’ll, instead of continuing like this, I’ll do something quite similar, and I’ll just say that if any of these comparisons are True, so I’m kind of reversing them.

00:28 So if first is equal to second, or first is equal to third, or first is equal to fourth,

00:40 or let’s see, second is equal to third, or second, and now I’m kind of, I’ll continue this soon, but I’ll just get some auto-formatting in place here.

00:53 second is equal to fourth. There we go. And then I think the last one we need to check is whether the third character is equal to the fourth character.

01:04 Yeah. So if any of these happen to be True, that means that we haven’t found the marker because that means that they’re not all different. So let’s quickly recap the code that you have there.

01:16 So you started with an if statement, and then you used the any() function, and any() checks if anything in a sequence is True.

01:26 Yes. It’s really a fancy way of writing many or statements together. Okay. Yeah, I think that’s a good way of saying it. So instead of what you started with or this or this, you just check like if any of them is True, then there is a character appearing again in the sequence of characters.

01:46 Right? And that means that we have a repeated character, which means if we just want to move everything one step ahead.

01:55 So in that case, I’ll add 1 to my marker. So now I’m moving the number that we’re kind of reporting at the end.

02:04 Now I want to also move all the first, second, third, and fourth things ahead. So that means that my new first character becomes what used to be the second character.

02:16 So that means in this example, we used to have m as the first character, but now I’m going to want to move ahead so that j becomes my first character.

02:24 And this j used to be the second character.

02:29 So I’m just saying, okay, now first is the old second. Then I can continue with the same logic. So my new second is the old third, my new third is the old fourth character, and then this is where it kind of becomes slightly different.

02:46 My new fourth character, that’s one that we need to pick up from the list of rest characters.

02:54 So I want to do something like this, where I take it from the first rest, but I also need to update rest. So I’ll do this in a slightly different way, where I’ll say that rest equals rest like this.

03:10 So here we’re using the same star argument (*) that we did earlier, meaning that, okay, let’s pack everything that’s left over into this variable.

03:20 So in the end, this means that fourth will get the first p from the list down there. And then the new rest is kind of updated to be everything from q and to the end.

03:31 Okay. And interesting, as well, in your code right now is that the order of the statements like first equals second, second equals third, and so on is important.

03:43 Yes, exactly. So the order is important because if we would do something like doing second equals third first, then we’re kind of overriding old second before we’re actually reading it.

03:53 So these lines depend on the order that we’re spelling them out in. That is true.