String Traversal and Character Access in DSA Python - Build from Scratch

String Traversal and Character Access

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are creating a simple program that reads a word and checks each letter one by one. This is like reading a word slowly to understand each letter.

🎯 Goal: You will build a program that stores a word, sets up a counter, goes through each letter in the word, and prints each letter on its own line.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a string variable with the exact value 'hello'

Create an integer variable called index and set it to 0

Use a while loop with the condition index < len(word)

Inside the loop, print the character at position index in word

Increase index by 1 inside the loop

Print each character on its own line

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Reading and processing text one character at a time is useful in text editors, spell checkers, and simple parsers.

💼 Career

Understanding string traversal is a basic skill needed for programming tasks like data cleaning, input validation, and building text-based applications.

1

Create the word variable

Create a string variable called word and set it to the exact value 'hello'.

DSA Python

# Create the string variable called word
# Your code here

Hint

Use single quotes around the word hello.

2

Set up the index counter

Create an integer variable called index and set it to 0.

DSA Python

word = 'hello'
# Create the index variable and set it to 0
# Your code here

Hint

This variable will help us move through each letter in the word.

3

Traverse the word using a while loop

Use a while loop with the condition index < len(word). Inside the loop, print the character at position index in word. Then increase index by 1.

DSA Python

word = 'hello'
index = 0
# Use a while loop to go through each character in word
# Your code here

Hint

Remember to increase the index inside the loop to avoid an infinite loop.

4

Print each character on its own line

Run the program to print each character of word on its own line using the print statement inside the loop.

DSA Python

word = 'hello'
index = 0
while index < len(word):
    print(word[index])
    index += 1
# Run the program to see the output

Hint

The output should show each letter of 'hello' on a new line.