Bit of List replacing trouble (newbie)

[Peter Otten]

Zethex wrote:

> At the moment i'm doing a piece of work for school and I'm stuck at the
> moment.
> 
> I have a list of words, for example:
> 
> Sentence = ['A', 'dog', 'walked', 'across', 'the', 'street']
> 
> I have another list which I need to use to replace certain words, and its
> in the form of:
> 
> synonyms = [
>                   [canine, [dog, puppy, bulldog]],
>                   [ road, [street, avenue, court]]
>                                                              ]
> What the procedure must do is replace dog with canine, and street with
> road. Therefore if a word is in the sentence and appears on the right side
> of the list entry, replace it with the left entry.
> 
> I can't seem to find a help file with what I'm after.  I'm just wondering
> if anyone can help me on the right track on how to start this procedure,
> maybe not an answer but just a little help on how to get started as I'm
> complete stuck right now.

See if you can put the synonyms in a dict:

syndict = {"dog": "canine", "puppy": "canine", ..., "court": "road"}

The code to achieve that should consist of two nested loops. 
You can then look up a word easily with

word = syndict.get(word, word) 

Put that into another loop iterating over the words of the original sentence
and build the new sentence by appending to a fresh list.

Peter