Odd uppercase letters in string after using .upper() in a for loop

spiffy 0
Viewed 39

As the title says, the output contains some uppercase letters, but for the life of me I can't figure out why. <=== Read the entire post to understand the problem. This is the code snippet which I'm assuming causes the 'error'.

def translate(s):
    i = 0
    word = ""
    for letter in s:
        word += letter.upper() + (letter * i) + "-"
        i += 1

The function takes a string as input and returns a string with first letter being capital and the following letters being multiplied by 1 += 1 (+1 for each set of different letters), followed by "-". Example:

Input and Output

Input: "ZpglnRxqenU"

Expected Output: "Z-Pp-Ggg-Llll-Nnnnn-Rrrrrr-Xxxxxxx-Qqqqqqqq-Eeeeeeeee-Nnnnnnnnnn-Uuuuuuuuuuu"

Actual Output: "Z-Pp-Ggg-Llll-Nnnnn-RRRRRR-Xxxxxxx-Qqqqqqqq-Eeeeeeeee-Nnnnnnnnnn-UUUUUUUUUUU"

The problem

As you can see, the R:s are all uppercase and so is the U:s. My question is: Why are they uppercase? I know why the first letter is, and that's intended but there should never be more than one uppercase (the first letter) per section (a section being within the bounderies of "-" and "-").

For further refrence: https://www.codewars.com/kata/5667e8f4e3f572a8f2000039/

OBS: I'm not doing this to get an answer to the codewars challenge.

This is the entire code.

def translate(s):
    i = 0
    word = ""
    for letter in s:
        word += letter.upper() + (letter * i) + "-"
        i += 1
    eq1 = list(word)
    eq1.reverse()
    eq1.remove("-")
    eq1.reverse()
    word = ""
    for y in eq1:
       word += y
    return word

Lines 7-12 are just my way of dealing with removing the last "-". The output would have an "-" at the end if it wasn't there. I know it's a bad way of dealing with it but I just wanted to finish it as fast as possible.

string-concatenation string for-loop python-3.x python
2 Answers

The R's and U's are uppercase because in the initial string, they are uppercase. They will stay uppercase unless you try to change them to lowercase.
Here is your updated code:

def translate(s):
    i = 0
    word = ""
    for letter in s:
        word += letter.upper() + (letter.lower() * i) + "-"
        i += 1

Notice the .lower() after letter in (letter * i).

Shib0

The R:s and U:s are uppercase because we multiply the first letter of the given character. It totally slipped my mind that the character may be uppercase and therefor the multiplies of the letter will too be uppercase.

spiffy0
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