Let’s play the Hangman game with Python

Aug 21, 2019 · 4 min read

Who has never played at least once the Hangman game? It was the perfect escape from a boring lesson and you only needed one paper and a pen. The idea is very simple: one player thinks about a word and the others have to guess, letter by letter, which is the word. The maximum number of wrong attempts depends on the way you decide to build your scaffold, however here we will set it equal to 10.

Every time your guessed letter is correct, the player who decided the word has to tell you the position of that letter, otherwise, the number of wrong attempts rises by 1 and the scaffold starts growing.

In this article, I’m going to build from scratch a Hangman game with Python, which will be the player who decides the word. For that purpose, I first downloaded from the module nltk.corpus a list of 236736 english words among which Python will decide.

import nltk
nltk.download('words')
from nltk.corpus import words
word_list = words.words()

Then, I set some variables which will be used throughout the game. Those are:

guess: an empty list which will be filled with my guessed letters
secret: it is the secret word we want to guess
length_word= the number of characters of the secret word
abc= my alphabet
letter_storage= an empty list where all the guessed letters (both wrong and correct) will be appended.

import randomguess = []# lets randomize single word from the list
secret = random.choice(word_list) 
length_word = len(secret)
abc = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
letter_storage = []

Now I’m going to define three functions for my purpose:

greetings(): it will create a first contact with the user, asking him his name and whether he wants to play

def greetings():
    print("Hello Mate!\n")    while True:
          name = input("Please enter your name\n").strip()          if name == '':
              print("You can't do that! No blank lines")
          else:
              choice=input('Do you want to play Hangman?\n').lower()
              if choice=='no' or choice=='n':
                print("That's a shame! Have a nice day")
                break
              elif choice=='yes' or choice=='y':              print("Awesome! So let's start! If you want to exit,  
              just type 'bye'")
                break
                
              else:
                  print("Please Answer only Yes or No")
                  continue

structure(): it will display the structure of the secret word, replacing consonants with ‘-’ and vowels with ‘*’. Note that, since you are going to use those functions for many matches, at the very beginning of the function I emptied the list guess[], so that it will not contain the symbols of previous secret words.

import randomvowels=list(['a','e','i', 'o', 'u'])
def structure():
    #let's remove the previous letter in our guess word
    guess.clear()    for character in secret: 
        if character in vowels:
            guess.append('*') #if in that position there is a vowel
        else:
            guess.append('-') #if in that position there is a  
                              #consonant    print("Ok, so the word you need to guess has {}    
          characters".format(length_word))    print("Be aware that you can enter only 1 letter from a-z\n\n")   
    print(guess)

guessing(): it is the function which will state whether our guessed letter is contained into the secret word. It asks us our guess, then it checks whether you want to quit the game (‘bye’), whether the input is a letter and whether that letter has already been picked (and hence stored into the letter_storage[]). Then, if the letter is in the secret word, it sets it into the right position in the list guess[], otherwise it tells us we were wrong and increases the number of wrong attempts by 1.

def guessing():
    letter_storage.clear() #emptying the list
    guess_taken = 1    while guess_taken < 10:       guess_letter = input("Pick a letter\n").lower()       if guess_letter=='bye':
            print('Goodbye!')
            break
       elif not guess_letter in abc: #checking input
            print("Enter a letter from a-z alphabet")
#checking if letter has been already used   
       elif guess_letter in letter_storage: 
            print("You have already guessed that letter!")
       else:            letter_storage.append(guess_letter)
            if guess_letter in secret:
                print("You guessed correctly!")
                for _i in range(length_word): 
                    if secret[_i] == guess_letter:
                        guess[_i] = guess_letter  
                print(guess)
#updating the list by substituting - or * with the right guess                if not ('-' and '*') in guess:
                    print("You won!")
                    break
            else:
                print("The letter is not in the word. Try 
                           Again!")
                guess_taken += 1
                if guess_taken == 10:
                    print(" Sorry Mate, You lost :<! The secret word 
                           was {}".format(secret))

Now we can run our three functions at one time like so:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    greetings()
    structure()
    guessing()

Nice! Now let’s play:

I have to admit it, I cheated so badly before playing (I had a glimpse at the secret word, shame on me) and I’m glad I did that, since I had no idea of what a mormaor was. For those who are curious: