Why won't this user created function work?

[Evyeniarocks]

This is the code I wrote, but when it prints the message at the end, it prints the original input as if it had not gone through the string function. What's the problem?

message=str(raw_input("Enter the encoded string: "))
message=message.lower()

def strip(string):
    stripped_message=""
    for i in range(0,len(string)):
        character=ord(string[i:i+1])
        if character in range(97,123):
            stripped_message+=chr(character)
    return stripped_message


strip(message)
print message

[ka06059]

your strip() function wont modify the argument, shouldve printed the return value instead

[mepyyeti]

It seems, to me, what you're doing is assigning a value to message variable, then in strip() you are a assigning stripped_message an 'altered' value of string and returning it, but not printing stripped_message.

You are executing strip(),without printing anything inside the function. Your last line is just a print function of the original message variable...

I hope the snippet below does the trick for you (if it does pls notice that print() is inside strip()).

message=str(raw_input("Enter the encoded string: "))
message=message.lower()
 
def strip(string):
    stripped_message=""
    for i in range(0,len(string)):
        character=ord(string[i:i+1])
        if character in range(97,123):
            stripped_message+=chr(character)
    print(stripped_message)#notice where print() occurs
    return stripped_message 

strip(message)

best of luck

[nilamo]

Strings are immutable. If you make changes to one, you need to assign the new string to the variable you want to refer to it by.

[DeaD_EyE]

He does it with stripped_message += chr(character), which makes a new string.
I prefer this way:

import string


def to_ascii(text):
    allowed = string.ascii_letters + string.digits
    # change allowed to 
    return ''.join(c for c in text if c in allowed)

print(filter_non_ascii('Hello World. 1243!!!!!........===??????'))

The thing inside the join method, is a Generator Expression.

[wavic]

''.join(filter(lambda ch: ch in allowed, text))

will do too.