[Tutor] problem with an anagram program

[Alan Gauld]

"jessica cruz" <jessica06cruz at yahoo.com> wrote

> I just started learning python an I'm currently working on this 
> program.

> The purpose of this program is to read a string of letters from user
> input and print out all the words which are anagrams of the input 
> string.

Where you define an anagram to be a word that is in wordlist I assume?

> it says that there is an error "invalid syntax" but I can't figure 
> out where.

Always send us the full error message, it usually tells us where
to look, which is easier than reading the full program!

> #this reads all of the words in the file into a list
> infile = open('/afs/cats/courses/cmps012a-cm/pa1/wordList.txt')
> wdcount = int(infile.readline()) #first item is count of all the 
> words

You do not use this, why bother?

> word_list = infile.readlines()
> wordList = []
> # code that will be compared will be a histogram type code with 
> frequency
> # characters
> def code(w):
>   hist = []
>   chars = list(w)
>   chars.sort()
>    for letter in chars:
>        if not letter in hist: # when the letter is not already in 
> hist,
>            hist.extend([letter, str(w.count(letter))]) # its added 
> to hist along with its freq.
>        else:
>           continue
>   coding = "".join(hist) # then they are joined as one string
>   return coding

> # new list is made with words in word_list followed by its code
> for word in word_list:
> wordList.append(word)
> wordList.append(code(word[:(len(word)-2)]))

word[:len(word)-2] could be written much more clearly as
word[:-2]

> while True:
> word1 = raw_input('Enter word:')
> word = word1.lower()
> sig = code(word)
> i = 1
> if sig in wordList:
> print "Anagrams:"
> while i <= len(wordList): # when the sig of the inputed word is in 
> the word list,
> if sig == wordList[i]

This looks like the syntax error - no colon.

I stopped here.
I think there are easier ways to do this!

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/l2p/