What am I doing wrong "IndexError: string index out of range"

Question

I'm new to programing . Started learning with Ben Stephenses Python workbook . Everything was going well up till about recently . In few exercises now I'm encountering the same problem . I will give an example with the last one , but the results in the previous was more or less the same . I must say , I'm sure there are better approaches and better ways to do it , but I'm trying to work with what I learned from the book so far which is not a lot . I'm sure that I will find some better solutions online but they will involve stuff I still hasn't learned and I'm trying to not use stuff like that .

Below you can find my code :

x= input("Enter your text: ")
list=[]
word=""
j=0
for j in range (0,len(x)-1):
    if x[j]!=" " :
        word=word+x[j]
        j=j+1
    else:
        list.append(word)
        word=""
        j=j+1
print(list)

What I'm trying to do is to separate the words in that string and put it in a list as individual words . If I execute the code as it is , it will put all the words in the list apart form the last one . I kind of think I know why is this happening . I believe cause of the spaces in between the words "j" goes out of range . Is that the case? Or it is something else? If that is the case , how can I deal with that ? If not what is it then ? I tried swapping the "if" with a "while" loop but then I'm getting : "while x[j]!=" " : IndexError: string index out of range"

Thanks !

Answer 1

One issue with your code is that you have range(0, len(x)-1). The range function produces a range that includes the starting point but excludes the endpoint, e.g.:

>>> list(range(0, 3))
[0, 1, 2]

So you want range(0, len(x)) otherwise you're missing the last character.

As for the omission of the last word:

We rely on seeing a space character to identify when a word ends. This does not work for the last word, since there is no space following it!

To fix this, we can simply add after the loop:

if word:
    list.append(word)

(Note that if word checks that word is non-empty, so we account for the case that the user inputs am empty string.)