Lab 5: Loops
Solutions
Worksheet solns
A simple diagram of the flow of a loop | |
A more engaging example of a loop in action | [From the Pixar short: Bao] |
Lab Setup
- Find your partner
- Use CyberDuck to SFTP into your account on the
cs.wellesley.edu
server - On the server, navigate to the
cs111/download
folder - Download the
lab05
folder to your Desktop (drag and drop it from the CyberDuck window) - Open Thonny and view the relevant
lab05
files
Table of Contents
- Lab 5 Home
- Part 0: Warm-up with loops
- Part 1: While Loops
- Part 2: For Loop practice
- Part 3: Strings and Loops
- Knowledge Check
Big Questions
- What is a loop variable, and how does it get its values?
Show Answer
A loop variable is the variable created when you create a loop, so if you writefor x in 'abc':
,x
is your loop variable. In each iteration of the loop, the loop variable takes the next value from the sequence that the loop is iterating over (in this example, the letters of the string'abc'
). - What happens when you use
return
inside a loop, and why might you want to do that?Show Answer
As always, if you usereturn
inside a loop, the current function ends, which also exits the loop. You can use this to your advantage to end the loop early if you are looking for something and you find it (for example, does a string contain a certain letter: after you see that letter, you don't need to continue the loop; you can immediately return True). However, you have to be careful: in some cases, you need to process or check each item in your sequence, and an early return would prevent this (for example, finding how many copies of a certain letter a string contains; in this case, we need to check each letter, and cannot return early).