word = input("Enter a word: ")
print("Original String is: ", word)
size = len(word)
print("Prnting only even index chars")
for i in range(0, size - 1, 2):
print("index[", i, "]", word[i])
I need to understand whether "size - 1" was a subtraction or something else.
I've tried to replace "size - 1" with just "8" and got the same answer. Because the word has 8 characters.
Short answer:
size - 1is used as the end point of the loop, but sincerange()excludes the end value, it might accidentally skip the last character.
It might seem like you need size - 1 because Python string indexing starts at 0. So if the word has 8 characters, the valid indexes are 0 to 7
But in Python, the range() function already stops before the end value. So if you use range(0, size - 1, 2), you're actually stopping at index 6 (because size - 1 is 7, and range() excludes the end).
That’s why you don’t need to subtract 1 — using range(0, size, 2) is correct. Otherwise, the last character might be skipped.
For example, with input "hello":
range(0, size - 1, 2) gives indexes 0 and 2 → prints h and l
range(0, size, 2) gives indexes 0, 2, and 4 → prints h, l, and o
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Also, instead of a loop, you can use slicing:
print("Printing only even index chars:")
print(word[::2])
Example:
Enter a word: hello
Printing only even index chars: hlo
If you want to separate the letters with commas:
print(", ".join(word[::2]))
This would output:
h, l, o
In Python (as in most programming languages), indexes start at 0.
In your case, if the user type "Hello World!", word[0] will contain the character "H", word[1] = "e", word[2] = "l" so on and so forth.
When iterating over each character, the last index accessed will be size - 1, since size represents the total number of characters in the string, and indexing starts from 0.
size - 1 is used to ensure that the loop does not include the last character, which is important for both odd and even lengths of the string.
You can replace size - 1 with 8 in the context of an 8-character string, but it is generally better to use size - 1 to make the code more flexible and adaptable to strings of different lengths.
