Submitting

Regardless of how you choose to complete the assignment, you MUST submit the file you worked on to Canvas. You can complete the assignment by: 1. Doing it on your own and submitting it to be graded; 2. Coming to class on Wednesday and working on it in your tutorial team; 3. attending one of our alternate tutorial times (see OH schedule - the second tab that says “Alternate Tutorial Times”).

IF YOU ARE SUBMITTING REMOTELY

If you’re submitting remotely, your submitted file will be graded for completeness and correctness. Make sure your functions are named as the assignment specifies exactly.

IF YOU ARE IN CLASS OR AT AN ALT TUTORIAL

There will be special instructions for attendance for this Tutorial. Please make sure to follow the directions given to you by Dr. Bain or by the Peer Mentor leading your Alt Tutorial Session. Attendance Google Form

Part 0. Intro

Today, we’ll be combining a number of the concepts we’ve been practicing the last few weeks in order to create a version of the game known as Wordle:

1. using loops
2. reading from files
3. validating inputs
4. working with dictionaries

You will be creating a Wordle-style game but in text rather than in graphics (spoiler alert: you’ll do a graphical for the Exercise). If you haven’t played Wordle before, your goal is to guess a secret 5-letter word in, at most, 6 guesses. Each time you guess, you’re given some “hints” about about how correct your guess was (screenshot available below):

Wordle Rules Screenshot

We’ll be building a simpler, text-based version for the Tutorial but then using the same techniques in Exercise 7 to create a super version!

Note: Depending on your browser, you may need to right click on the wordlist button and select “Download linked file…” or “Save linked file as…”. Make sure to save it as 5_letter_words.txt.

General Approach

Please make the following enhancements to the tutorial6.py file (each marked TODO in the .py file). In addition to the TODOs you’ll find a number of comments helping you perform each task.

PLEASE NOTE: While you only have to write new code in the parts that are marked TODO in tutorial6.py, you’ll need to understand the other code in tutorial6.py in order to know how to edit it to complete the assignment. You can search for the TODO tags using the File menu then “Search” in IDLE. THIS MEANS YOU WILL NEED TO LOOK AT THE EXISTING CODE AROUND THE TODOs to see what is done already and what you'll need to fill-in. DON'T JUST START WRITING CODE. First, understand what's there THEN start editing.

Part 1. Reading in possible words

After the template file, first complete the TODOs in the read_in_words function. This function accepts one input, the path to the file we want to read words from. The template is already setup on line 59 to use this function to on the 5_letter_words.txt file you downloaded and expects it to return a list of 5 letter words from that file.

To do this, you need to:

• Open the file specified by the input argument
• Loop through the file line by line
  • Each line of this file is a word along with some associated word-stem information (this is actually a dictionary from the game Scrabble). Open the 5_lettter_words.txt file in some text editor and you’ll see what I mean.
  • For Wordle, we only need the very first part of this line, i.e., only the stuff before the first space (" ").
  • So split each line by spaces
  • Then append the very first element of the list you get back from splitting to the list of words
  • There should be 1204 valid words in the file
• Close the file
• Return the list of words. The template then saves those words into the GAME_DATA dictionary for you

Once you’re done, try adding some print statements to check the contents and size of the list you want to return.

Part 2. Picking a secret solution

In the middle of the file, look for the "Next pick a solution" section. Complete the TODOs here:

• Use the choice function to pick a random word from the "word_list" key of the GAME_DATA dictionary
• Save that random choice inside the "solution" key of the GAME_DATA dictionary

It might be wise to print out the entry (GAME_DATA["solution"]) after this to both confirm everything is working okay AND just in case you’re bad at Wordle (😉).

Part 3. Validating a guess

Towards the bottom of the file, you’ll find a “game loop” which is a while loop that helps us interact with the user. Here you’ll find a number of TODOs:

• Convert the guess variable that takes input from the user to make it all upper-case
• Check to see if their guess is exactly 5 letters long
• Check to see if their guess is a valid word inside the "word_list" key of the GAME_DATA dictionary

Once you’re done, try running the game and inputting some words. Try at least one valid 5 letter word, one invalid 5 letter word (like AAAAA), and one non-5 letter word. Make sure the program does what you might expect (and the comments say to do, including using continue to ask for another guess).

Note on using the range Function

While working on the two Wordle assignments, there will often be a time where it might be convenient to use a list of numbers to iterate through each letter of a guess (you can use our square bracket index notations to get specific letters of a string) and compare it to the secret word. Like anything in programming, there are lots of ways to do this. You could for instance, do:

i = 0
while i < 6:
  print(secret_word[i], guess[i])
  i = i + 1 # you can even shorten this by saying i += 1

Alternatively, you can use the range function to emulate the same thing with a for loop:

for i in range(0, 6, 1):
  print(secret_word[i], guess[i])

# which is equivalent to
for i in [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]:
  print(secret_word[i], guess[i])

When only given two inputs, range interprets them as a “from”, “up to”, and a “step size”. That is, range(0, 6, 1) gives us back the list [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

Both ways are totally fine, so use whatever way is most convenient for you.

Part 4. Generating a hint

Complete the TODOs in the generate_hint function.

• Loop through each letter of the solution and…
  • If the letter perfectly matches the solution, you’ll add a "🟩" to the hint
  • If the letter is in the solution, but isn’t in the right location, you’ll add a "🟨" to the hint
  • Otherwise the letter isn’t in the solution at all, so you’ll add a "⬜" to the hint
• return the hint

Once you’ve completed all of your to-dos, make sure to run your program and see if it works like it should! Note, because we don’t have access to the real Wordle word list, some of your favorite Wordle words might not work. We’ll try to fix this in the Exericse!

Note: If you follow these steps you’ll create a Wordle with a small “double-letter bug” in that the real Wordle gives you information about how many times a letter appears in the solution. You do NOT need to worry about this in either the tutorial or homework this week. If you want to solve it you may–it just involves counting how many times a letter occurs and basing the “hint” off of that information.

Credits

This assignment is obviously inspired by the original Wordle now owned by the New York Times.

The word list we’re using is from the 2023 North American Scrabble Championship which is supported by NASPA.